The Dragonfly Sea

by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

  Ayaana came to. She did not know when Koray had gone. She was alone on the bench, with five birds at her feet, and the day had turned orange. Her bicycle was propped against the bench. There was no Koray. She touched her neck. Later, when she returned to her room to shower, she would see the bruising. She would lock her door and reinforce the handle with a chair and lie in her bed, watching the ceiling and listening for footsteps in the corridor, remembering Delaksha. No tears. She had glimpsed how a woman might become haunted. Basmallah, she remembered. She would draw it out, as Muhidin had suggested, a reliable means of exorcism.

  * * *

  —

  The next day, Ayaana walked into the evening class with her laptop bag, wearing a tank top that revealed her neck and exposed the bruises. She had tied up her hair so that there would be no disguising the discoloration. Koray was the first to exclaim, “Oh, canim, did you fall?” He walked up to her as if to embrace her. He whispered, “Cover up. What are you doing?”

  She wrapped one arm around him.

  He gasped.

  She murmured, “A long, sharp steel point is piercing your chest. It is pointed at your heart. If you move, I will push it in.”

  Koray’s voice was thin, but he was still. “You bitch. You dare to threaten me?”

  She said, “No, canim, I am telling you.” Stillness. “Smile, Koray, you have turned green.”

  He asked, “What do you want me to do now?” She moved the tip of the steel, and Koray, with fury in his tone, suggested, “You want me to apologize and vow never to choke you again or something similarly banal, yes?”

  Ayaana stepped away from him, palming her calligraphy pen. “No, I wanted to see if the threat of death affects you. It does.” She nodded. She slid the pen into her bag.

  Koray’s eyes were cold and yellowish. “You would be so easy to kill.”

  Ayaana’s voice was cool. “True. But I swear, you will bleed to death with me.”

  Ayaana then pivoted. She waved at Ari. She mouthed something to Shalom, making a phone gesture. She moved to a chair next to the wall before her knees gave way. She leaned back, just as she had seen Bollywood gangsters do on film. She then stuck her phone earpiece into her ears, nodding to the silence of a turned-off phone while her heart pounded and she tried not to vomit on her books. She wanted the maritime-cartography session to begin at once.

  * * *

  Koray seemed to have disappeared soon after. This made Ayaana nervous. Looking over her shoulders. Ayaana spent days and nights in the library. She signed up for on-water assignments. She waited for news from home in increasing despondence. Where was Muhidin? She considered traveling back to a certain lighthouse. The passing days brought filtered news of a restless world and all too soon, it was her birthday. She thought she would mark it in silence. Early in the morning, when she opened her door to step out, there was a hamper filled with peaches, teas, dates, lotus seeds, a bunch of lilies, and some rose halwa. A red envelope. A note. The note contained five words: “Still charmed. Always your Koray.”

  Lenye mwanzo lina mwisho.

  What has a beginning has an end.

  [ 89 ]

  She sat by the lake to feed the swans for what would be the last time. She remembered the friends she had made, the fleeting acquaintances who would end up in so many other parts of the world. Dispersions. Her hands swirling in the water, she conjured a vision of a potter in a lighthouse.

  * * *

  —

  A phone call in the night had secured her decision to leave.

  * * *

  —

  No preamble. Koray was matter-of-fact. “I am in Istanbul.” Ayaana blinked. “Last evening, my father, Emirhan Terzioğlu, died. We were with him.”

  A groggy Ayaana said, “I am so sorry.”

  Koray said, “He did not die well.” Ayaana’s thoughts scampered. “You will now come.”

  Ayaana had reacted as if an ice block had fallen on her. A clear memory of a promontory: a desire to jump. Ayaana turned to stare at the full-blooded orange moon of the night through her window. Silence.

  Koray said, “Ayaana?”

  There was a theory among fisherfolk that in the season of the full moon extra caution was needed by blooded beings, for blood, like the tide, was drawn to the moon: the fuller the moon, the greater the impulse to fling one’s being in its direction, especially by way of the turbulent sea. In cultures where exorcisms happened, the first act was to demand the name of the ghost: Koray. Renouncing, detaching, and annulling its power—the suggestion of a planned, secured future—was a brutal and absolute act. A force burst from a nook of Ayaana’s soul and drove her fingers to switch off her phone with all her strength.

  Ayaana sat through that night with hands half covering her face. On her way down into the depth of her heart, enclosed in the hum of refreshed mysteries, she saw Emirhan and smelled the grief of all the world’s unmourned. She swam past Koray, his face, this stranger, this lover, and the universes he offered her, for the price of her soul and its ghosts. And the moon’s light was on her body and offered itself to her as another witness. Wetness ran down Ayaana’s arms. And then she was done. Another lesson: endings were a rehearsal for death; death was in the constitution of life.

  * * *

  Two nights later, Ayaana opened the door to her room to discover a large brown package waiting for her. She opened the parcel at dawn, after a sleepless night. Inside were two bubble-wrapped ceramic vessels. Her potter had used clear lacquer, gold, and copper to repair them. They were even more perfect with their burnished flaws.

  [ 90 ]

  Two weeks later, Ayaana returned to the site of her hair disaster. The hairdresser recoiled at her approach and smothered the panic on his face. “Cut it all off,” she told him, and plunked herself into a chair that was too small for her hips. The hairdresser’s initial paralysis gave way to zeal once he was wielding his special scissors and a fine-toothed comb. With renewed confidence, he summoned minions to oversee different roles in the experiment that was Ayaana’s head. When she emerged from the snipping and shaping, the hairdresser and his assembled hair team were certain they had turned Ayaana into Rihanna. “Liana,” he announced. Shorn, Ayaana endured new photographs, the final record of her China sojourn. She looked at the woman in the photograph; the world and its experiences had reshaped her face.

  * * *

  —

  Ayaana left Xiamen and China.

  * * *

  —

  The feeling of departure: the stomach hardening into a ball. Her life was in her mouth as the Kenya Airways plane pointed its nose skyward, rising and rising as if never intending to return to earth. At the midway point, Ayaana looked down at the land from her window. An impenetrable haze covered it. She attended to her seatmates. The plane was packed with Chinese citizens. Ayaana had smiled at the hostess—name tag “Achieng.” Hours later, touchdown, in Nairobi. Everything stopped mattering when the Kenyan sun, never brutal, reached her face. The scent of homecoming. The sweat of dawn smelled of mango mixed with clove, earth, and fire.

  * * *

  —

  A stout immigration officer in a black suit and tie asked Ayaana, “Umerudi?”—You have returned?

  “Nimerudi,” Ayaana answered—I have.

  Mtumbwi wa kafi moja huanza safari mapema.

  The boat that has one paddle leaves early.

  [ 91 ]

  Seven months after Ayaana left China, a most curious event took place in an art gallery in Guangzhou. The gallery was exhibiting the most recent works of the reclusive ceramicist Po Fu, titled, “About This Earth, Woman.” These were assorted pieces that suggested the curves and shape and roundedness of a female body. The press heralded them as “sensuous, dramatic, and evolutionary.” Black and brown lacquered vessels. There was a triptych that, if placed together, produced a reclining form, the back of
which bore henna-colored whorls and lines, and was infused with a scent—in this case, night jasmine, a trademark of the ceramicist’s work. An art critic who hyperventilated with hyperbole had featured pictures of these in the China Daily. The effusive praise drew the attention of a man who was returning to Xiamen from Istanbul on a plane, who was browsing idly through the newspaper’s pages. He read and reread the phrase “inspired by his experience of the Western Ocean learned through the gaze and touch of a Descendant.”

  * * *

  —

  Three days later, a gallery curator’s words bashed into themselves as he babbled on the phone to the gallery owner. A foreigner had walked in to purchase the most expensive trio of pieces. Four days later, the owner, an unnaturally thin woman who had returned after living in Australia, clopped into her gallery space in a tight black designer dress and red platform shoes embedded with diamonds, to meet the buyer who had paid up front for the triptych. The check had just cleared. The purchaser strode into the gallery—closed to the public—an hour earlier than expected. They had arranged a private viewing for him.

  * * *

  —

  The dark-haired man with hooded eyes, in a Hugo Boss suit—she noticed such things—was curt. He wore dark glasses that tinted his upper cheekbones. His customized timepiece was made of platinum. The gallery owner studied the man, a beautiful, rich foreign man. The gallery owner simpered. Her assistants and curator hovered.

  The man drawled, “Check okay?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The pieces are mine?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Excellent.” The man approached the triptych. His long fingers stroked the three pieces. “Exquisite,” he said.

  “Sir, how would you like us to prepare them for you?”

  The buyer lifted the first of the pieces and deliberately dropped it. It shattered. The curator shrieked and rushed over. Koray stopped him by lifting up his left hand. He stared the weeping curator down. Soon the second and third pieces were fragmented heaps beneath their intricate stands. Koray studied his handiwork. The woman owner stumbled on her heels to stand close to him. The woman looked up at him. “Dinner?” she suggested. She proffered a card.

  Koray looked at her, raised an eyebrow, and smiled. He took the card. She walked with Koray toward her employees. Koray paused and placed a hand on the curator’s shoulder. “Curator?” The man bowed. Koray’s Putonghua was passable. “Tell the potter that this”—he indicated the broken pieces—“is private territory. Those seas and what they contain…Trespassers will be smashed.”

  The curator nodded with vigor.

  “Now, repeat the message…”

  The curator stumbled over the words a few times, to the nods of his gallery owner. Koray then patted his shoulder. Koray turned and kissed the gallery owner on her cheek before sauntering out, whistling a phrase from an irritating but catchy Korean pop song.

  * * *

  —

  The gallery owner sent Lai Jin his portion of the money from the sale. She did not inform him of the fate of his work. She swore her staff and curator to secrecy on the pain of death.

  * * *

  Months later, Lai Jin was being subjected to self-righteous officiousness by eight state officials who had been lurking in the vicinity, circling like nervous serpents. They waved massive blueprints, these bureaucrats who now laid claim to the lighthouse, the island, the area. These plans were for a brand-new resort. Lai Jin halted his wheel and wiped his hands before turning to stare at the public servants. Estrangement from space and country was a slow-drip process. He had expected this. Outside, the ducks quacked in contentment. Lai Jin picked clay flecks from his fingers and shirt and thought of the sparrows, who would return in the spring and find no roosting ground. He glanced out a window toward a misted horizon to tune out the men. “In the beginning there was…” Looking back: “Events cast shadows before themselves,” it has been said. “Water?” he asked the men, trying to be courteous.

  * * *

  —

  Later, he watched one of the men brand the lighthouse with a massive black “X” on behalf of the nation.

  * * *

  —

  Lai Jin spent the night after the visit studying the old compass Ayaana had given him. Seeking north.

  * * *

  —

  Within a month, Lai Jin had packed his home in eight boxes. He had forged a hollowed silver bracelet. In this he rolled and stored the Basmallah Ayaana had left him with. Days later, he would attempt to drive the surprised ducks away. They were outraged by his behavior. They waddled away for a while before returning as a flock.

  “Abandon ship,” he commanded the ducks, sparrows, earth, lighthouse, and sea.

  Lai Jin left for Hong Kong.

  It would take more than three months to dissolve most of his assets and then imagine another destination.

  Kilichomo baharini, kakingojee ufukoni.

  That which is in the sea will wash up on the shore.

  [ 92 ]

  Ayaana’s return coincided with that of a different kind of sea visitor, a harbinger. Pate’s Captain Mohamed Lali Kombo and two crew members had retrieved it from their fishing nets and brought it to shore. “Sea dog,” they called it. They laid it on the jetty, where it peered in genial curiosity at its watchers. The news spread. It was delivered to a radio announcer, who broadcast it. The message brought to Pate those who would then identify it as a Cape sea lion. It was so far from home. It belonged to the farthest of seas. A harbinger, it was understood. But its destination was elsewhere. After a discussion among many, the islanders decided to bless the sojourner and its mysterious journey. They returned it to Captain Kombo’s boat, and he and his crew restored it to the sea. Harbingers—birds borne on the matlai, moon-drunk dragonflies, and dolphin schools, a sea lion, the changing seasons of earth. Stars disappeared. Time and the debris of souls moved by the monsoon showed up on Pate’s dark sand shores. Ayaana reappeared on the archipelago that held her island. Her head buzzed with the sense of this return. Words. Language. Home. It was the light over the jetty. It was looking at other skins and seeing shades of her own. Words, an iridescent river. Her senses remembered the colors of thought, the savor of words, the scent of images, the way to inhabit the here and now.

  Ayaana eavesdropped on the wind, picking up song fragments. The tide report, the Kenyan nation in its unending election cycle, the preoccupation of the passing citizens with the character of their politicians: “scavengers.” Synonyms: wabeberu, washenzi, kingugwa, adui, wahuni. Ayaana laughed—the familiarity of national discontent. She shifted from foot to foot on the jetty, her two pieces of luggage near her.

  Listening. Discerning, again, those in-between spaces that transmuted ordinary things: hyenas could gossip with hares; Fumo Liyongo, legend and leader, could still walk in fire-emitting footsteps; braying donkeys were harbingers; and not every person who stared at you was a person. The plane that had deposited her on Lamu Island took off with a new set of passengers. Ayaana watched it before turning to read her seas again, as if they were a childhood story whose every word she had rubbed and tasted and stored inside her best dreams.

  * * *

  —

  Ayaana faced the ancient city on a waterfront. The children: laughter. They dived into the sea. And she realized she might bawl. Ceaseless greetings of passersby. Colors, colors, and she was dizzy and drunk. Home: incoming souls. Some tourists. Listening. Mostly Germans, ignoring travel advisories. The watu wa bara, upcountry visitors, humorless civil servants. Home-comers. Today, she was a home-comer. Circling boats, and the light on prows, the light on the water. Blue light, purple light, orange light. Light that lit up light. She had forgotten that light could also be this. On a nearby field, chickens, goats, sheep, and a single cow. Ayaana’s heart finally slowed down. A wind traversed the channel, twirling gold and bro
wn leaves in its wake.

  * * *

  —

  And then the Asr Adhan resounded:

  “Allahu Akbar…”

  Herald. Promise.

  “Allahu Akbar…”

  The song ripened.

  “Hayya alas Salah…”

  A relay of offbeat summonses from mosques across the water. Ayaana exhaled and lifted her face skyward. From there, a whisper from another time reached her: “Greet Yourself / In your thousand other forms / As you mount the hidden tide and travel / Back home…”

  * * *

  —

  The public ferry to Pate was at the Lamu jetty, overladen with goods plus a few goats and souls, waiting with the captain for high tide. Babble of voices in the lyrics of home. Etchings of life woven into the land in Kiamu, Kimvita, Kipate, and Kiunguja words, and the voices of others who had found a home here. It would be a three-to-four-hour ferry ride to the jetty on Pate, and another hour or so to walk into Pate Town. A sudden inspiration: Ayaana decided to hire a speedboat instead. She chose the newest one and persuaded its young owner, Captain Ali, to let her pilot it after they had reached the Mkanda Channel. Ayaana sped home.

  [ 93 ]

  Those who had known the child were jolted by the sight of the elegant, foreign-seeming woman in short hair, large sunglasses, and high black boots who had returned to them, who rode into the harbor on one of Lamu’s new speedboats. She stepped ashore with confidence and a coolness that created temporary awe.