The Dragonfly Sea

by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

  “Does it mean the same?” Mama Suleiman wondered.

  Ayaana replied, “Probably.”

  Other images from the same kind of hell—the still-smoldering ruins of cities older than time, returned, literally, to the Stone Age. Rubble. “There are no other places to go,” Mama Suleiman said later, “only here.” She caressed the tablet’s screen. Later, she added, “He is here.” They were still studying faces on the screen, the dead as well as the living.

  * * *

  —

  Ayaana turned away from the screen and the mother to watch the sea. Its sweat washed away the memory of what they had seen. The blue-silver light of the fading moon tinted the waves’ edges. Ayaana observed that, on the night of a mother’s sobs, the djinns did not cry. A new day started, luminous. Mama Suleiman’s face and body were calm. To Ayaana she said, “This does not mean that I like you any better.” Ayaana shrugged. Mama Suleiman said, “We are not friends.” Ayaana agreed, “No.” Stillness. Mama Suleiman asked, “Do you still throw yourself into the sea?” Ayaana’s head swiveled to gawk at the woman. The woman’s gaze was on her. Ayaana looked away. She watched the sky, now tinged with orange and violet. She considered again an island that hemorrhaged secrets. She did not even bother to laugh. Mama Suleiman said, “Soon I must plunge into my ocean. I shall bring my son home.” The woman lifted herself up from the ground. She carried her tablet. She left Ayaana without another word and faded into the new day. It was as if she had not been there at all.

  Mvua haina hodi.

  The rain needs no permission to fall.

  [ 107 ]

  A ponytailed man from China wearing frameless glasses disembarked from an airplane in Nairobi. He was about to learn a country in as many of its textures as he could contain, acquire some of its cadences and senses, before he took another plane and then a boat to an island that was his real destination. Elsewhere, harbingers—birds borne on matlai winds that coincided with the departure of yellowfin tuna from the seas, moon-colored dragonflies, the signs of earth’s changing seasons. Sometimes the jetsam of the seas collected on monsoon-fed shorelines. Sometimes these included strangers: passers-through, and those destined to stay, stepping across thresholds into the lives of those who, though almost incinerated by so many recent darknesses of the human heart, still set up a ritual of hospitality for the guest.

  * * *

  Almost four months later, a slow ferry that had broken down twice and turned a five-hour crossing into a seventeen-hour odyssey limped into Mtangwanda. One of the men on board did not mind the delay. He disembarked, carrying a rucksack and two dark blue metal cases. He looked around. Two boys who had been diving into the water from the jetty surfaced. They stared at the arrivals, but this one was the most obvious outsider of all who had landed on Pate that day. They laughed as they saw the man sniff the air as a dog might. The man turned to take slow steps to the place where the land met the sand.

  * * *

  —

  Thresholds—treading softly into the mysteries of others’ lives. He hesitated. A breeze drew his attention to a beckoning plant with delicate flowers. He crossed to look, and there it was, a wild-rose bush. He cupped a floret as children sneaked up behind him to look, discussing what he might be up to. The man turned to them. They darted backward, laughing. He smiled. Then, in hesitant Nairobi-acquired Kiswahili, badly spaced, abrupt words, he enunciated with care: “Hamjambo. Ninaitwa Lai Jin. Natafuta mtu wangu. Anaitwa, Haiyan. Tafadhali.”

  The children laughed.

  Then, to his left, a crackling voice intoned, “Masalkheri”—Good evening. The visitor looked over his shoulder at a white kanzu-clad wizened presence, a dark golden man of the sea, bent with his age, who looked back at him with the most open gaze he had ever seen.

  “Ni hao,” he blurted, and then remembered where he was. He lowered his head, as if he had erred. “Umekaribishwa,” the elder pronounced, and offered him a hand, and then called for others to help Lai Jin with his luggage.

  * * *

  —

  Tender-voiced, “Pole sana.”

  We are sorry. For what?

  Karibu na pole, from so many mouths. Pole. Only later would he understand that it was assumed he had come to bear witness to the life, loss, and meaning of Mzee Kitwana Kipifit. And he would do so.

  * * *

  Two boys pranced around Ayaana while she soldered a joint on an anchor she was working on for Fundi Mehdi, as the radio delivered news of the state of the tides. The children shouted over her work, to tell her in disjointed words that a guest had arrived on the island and was asking for her. They told her that the man was right now being escorted to her mother’s house but would be hosted by Mwalimu Juma. Ayaana paused. “I have heard,” she informed the children, and then proceeded with her work. Fundi Mehdi glanced at her and shrugged. They heard from the news deliverer that a storm was expected at sea, and that all boats should return to shore. They glanced seaward at the same time. Silver-tinged dark shadows on cumulus clouds.

  * * *

  At sundown, after prayers, Ayaana walked up to her mother’s house. She listened for the clattering of pots, heard her little sister’s voice, her numerous whys. When she approached, Abeerah sang out her name and dashed out on fat legs for a hug. Ayaana carried her back into the house. Her mother met her at the door and took Abeerah. “Wash up,” Munira said, looking flustered.

  “Who?” Ayaana whispered.

  Munira fluttered her hands. “China.”

  Ayaana’s back stiffened. She inhaled. She then slid into the kitchen to wash her hands and face and postpone her entry into the living room. She scrubbed her hands and reached for a tattered dishcloth, hearing the pounding of her heart. Somewhere, her sister prattled. She peeped and saw Lai Jin standing in front of the Zao Wou-Ki print she had framed and hung next to a tiny alcove in the wall, next to the two repaired lacquered vessels.

  Ayaana stepped out, her heart in her mouth. Without turning, Lai Jin said in Mandarin, “The rose of your skin—I have now seen its flowers.”

  Silence. He turned around and smiled at her. “I met the descendants.”

  “They are of Pate,” Ayaana said.

  Lai Jin simply watched her as she circled him, relishing her discomfort. Ayaana flexed her fingers. “Nioreg from the ship…He was here.” Lai Jin lifted his head. “He came to bury Delaksha.” Ayaana watched him. “You knew?” She stepped closer to him. “That she died?”

  Lai Jin said, “I should have told you.” His face tilted away as he recalled how he had been sprawled next to Nioreg, who covered Delaksha’s body with his own. Together they had watched Delaksha’s eyes dilate as blood trickled out of her nose and ears. It had soaked their clothes. Nioreg’s cries: The diction of fire, Lai Jin had thought then. Stupendous stillness. He had propped up his head as if it were the heaviest of boulders. He would be accused. He would be implicated in this tragedy. He would suffer for it.

  He turned back to Ayaana, gesturing, palm open. Ayaana turned her gaze to the outside view. The sea was churning in anticipation of the storm. Her mind was jumping in all directions. What could she say? “Sit. Coffee?” she asked.

  He shook his head. He did not sit.

  She said, “On my plane home…there were more of you than there were of us on board. China is our typhoon.” Her mind grasped for clarity. At last she really looked at him. “Why are you here?”

  Lai Jin’s hands opened and closed; opened and closed. “Haiyan,” he said through gritted teeth, “I’m not ‘China.’ I am Lai Jin. A man. I am here. My purpose is to find you. A man. He has come to find Haiyan. A man, not ‘China.’ ” Pain spots in his eyes. He approached Ayaana, his look troubled.

  She looked down at her hands.

  “A man,” he repeated.

  “I owe you nothing,” she stuttered. Surprised by how easy it was to slip into Mandarin, how different
she felt in another language.

  Lai Jin moved to face her. “I saved your life.”

  “The ship was yours,” she countered.

  He was smiling. “Your debt.” Lai Jin stroked her face. Remembrance. “I have traversed your country. It is a deep country. In some places…where the roads are built by our China”—a shine in his eyes—“in the bus I have lied; I said I am from Japan. We design good roads.” A snort. He had enjoyed saying this, his poke in the eye of a hateful stepmother. He was embarrassed by the convoluted mess of tarmac, those unfinished edges, the slapdash signs that did not honor his people. Confronted by the hideous quality of his nation’s projects, in an act of private protest, Lai Jin had presented himself, when the question of identity and infrastructure merged, as not-Chinese.

  Ayaana raised a brow. “What are you here?”

  “A man,” he repeated.

  Desire: its confusing reach. She stuttered. “For how long have you been in Kenya?”

  “One hundred and eighteen days.”

  Ayaana gasped. “What?”

  “I try to know to what I come.”

  Ayaana turned again to face the sea, turbulence on her features. One hundred and eighteen days? Her voice trembled as she rushed to fill it: “The vases are beautiful.” She gestured to the alcove. “Thank you for fixing them.” Her voice faded. She was still bemused by Lai Jin’s presence in her mother’s house. She was not entirely certain she was not asleep. This could be a dream layered upon a tempest of memories of lacerating, unexpected, and unsettling intimacies. Ayaana tried to demur. “What if it is only a brother that I now require?”

  Lai Jin breathed slowly, choosing a thought, a slight flush on his face. First, disarm. “The treasure you left me,” she looked up at him. He added, “The prayer…” She nodded. “I carry it on me.” He tapped his bracelet. “Here.” When he was captain, he was most at ease in deep waters, far from known horizons, immersed in the imagination of uncertainty. These here were uncharted waters. “About your question”—a gambit—“name wo shi ni di gege”—then I am your elder brother.

  * * *

  On a promontory, two beings stared down at a sea stirring itself in a sudden high-tide frenzy, as if it had been caught snoozing by an authority figure. The melody of the tide, a resolute and confident flowing now that the anticipated storm had evaporated. Moonlight on water. A curious creature—a goat, perhaps—foraged nearby. Ayaana inched closer and closer to Lai Jin until their bodies touched—just. With the corner of his gaze, Lai Jin attempted to reread Ayaana within the geography of her home and its waters. Lai Jin groped for a word to complete the picture.

  * * *

  —

  An odd sensation of falling out of time had shaken Lai Jin’s balance at the Lamu jetty before the iridescence of a storm-threatened violet-silver sea. It was as if he had stumbled into a warp that ignored expected spatial and temporal relationships with the world. He recognized in silhouettes another past and future imaged in the crumbling infrastructure and seductive desolation of an older history upon which the present hovered. Ghost presences would brush against skin and cause the hairs of his head to stand on end. Fifteen minutes into his arrival, as he crossed the ancient trails toward his rooms, he had seen a crow standing one-legged on a moon-shaped Chinese tomb with the sun in its eyes. That was the moment when he understood that memory was also matter.

  Afterward, he had seen Ayaana.

  A sense of inevitability had staggered him: the knowledge that, whatever else he had done, his journeying would have ended right here. He exhaled, and below them the waters splintered themselves on the rocks. Beneath her lashes, Ayaana studied the former ship captain. She tested him: “There is a man. His name is Koray. He and his mother have designed a future for me in Turkey. Their imaginings are so vast that they swallow even my fate. Just like China dreaming Kenya…without our elephants and lions, without our land, without us.” She watched Lai Jin for his reaction.

  Lai Jin’s hand moved to her arm. She leaned against his shoulders, then dropped her head against his chest. “How long will you stay?” she whispered.

  He did not reply.

  She murmured, “How is the lighthouse?”

  “Now dust.”

  Silence.

  * * *

  —

  “Come.” Ayaana pirouetted. She grabbed his arm. “I’ll introduce you to Mother…my dear brother.”

  Lai Jin hesitated, saw the challenge in her eyes.

  He would play along.

  * * *

  —

  Ayaana called as she approached the door, “Ma-ee, our brother. He has come from China.” She smirked at Lai Jin. “See the little girl? Doesn’t she look like me? The right age for a daughter.” Munira appeared, laughter in her eyes, seeing more than Ayaana gave her credit for. “Maaaa, this is Lai Jin.” Ayaana said. “He is a ship captain. He is also a potter.”

  * * *

  Lai Jin took two rooms in the back of Hudhaifa’s shop. After two weeks, he moved out. Mwalimu Juma had made a deal with an absentee landlord who was based in Oman, who had a house Lai Jin could rent for a token fifty dollars a month, and he could do so indefinitely, as long as he repaired and maintained it.

  [ 108 ]

  Pate Island insinuated itself into Lai Jin’s core. Returning to Pate Town in the matatu, he had sat next to Mwalimu Juma, who proceeded to tutor him, answering his questions about Pate, its life, its meaning, its shadows. Mwalimu Juma asked him if he knew what he wanted from life. Lai Jin said he was a pilgrim. Their conversation stretched long after their arrival at their destination, and then crossed into the doorway of the things of faith. Lai Jin said he did not know what faith meant. A drizzle started over the land. They listened to the drip-drip of water as they sheltered in a makeshift café.

  * * *

  —

  When Lai Jin visited the village of Shela, near Lamu, he imagined he could apprentice himself to one of the re-creators of the architecture of the space. But when he returned to Pate with some of the fishermen who had recognized him, he helped them haul in and sort their catch and wondered if he might consider the art of fishing. Mimicking their words, he acquired more of Pate’s words and worlds. On some days, he would be at the jetty, talking engines and sea routes with assorted vessel captains, watching the time; the rhythms of Pate were converting him into another kind of man. It was among these men that he was first renamed “Nahodha Jamal.”

  * * *

  —

  A moment in dusk. Migrant dragonflies flitted above Lai Jin’s head as he stopped to stare at Pate’s old crescent-spaced tombs. Tang, he suspected—not Ming, as was presumed. Downturn of mouth, the wind on his skin. Goose bumps. A realization: there was nothing unique about his presence here. He stroked the curves on a tombstone. Ebb. Flow. Repetition. Rhythm of the ages. Nothing new or unusual about the arrival or departure of souls from here or elsewhere. It was the warp and weave of existence.

  * * *

  —

  Lai Jin stumbled into ancient whispers: the presence of persistent ghosts. And, breath by breath, he allowed the island into himself, this ruined trading state, this moldering realm. Ebb. Flow. Some days, he waited for Ayaana to find him at the dunes or promontory; other times, he wandered some more along the seashore. What he understood: the more he knew of life, the less it made sense.

  * * *

  —

  He grimaced.

  * * *

  —

  Waiting.

  * * *

  —

  She was already at the promontory waiting for him.

  “Wo de airen,” he called out to her—My lover.

  She answered, “Yes?,” as if it were normal. Ayaana had tied a green leso around her waist, he noted. “Where did you go?” she called to him.

  He had ventured to the north of the isl
and. “Siyu.”

  “Alone?” She raised a brow.

  “Yes.” He smiled.

  She crouched. “Why?”

  “Kuchi.”

  The fighting chicken.

  She frowned. “To gamble?”

  “No.”

  “Then why?”

  “Breeding.”

  “Breeding?”

  “They are good birds. Very strong, very heavy.”

  “You’ll eat them?”

  “Chinese eat everything.”

  She looked up at him, ready to attack the statement. He was teasing her. “Very funny,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  Eyes met. The same pull, the same storm. She touched her mouth. He watched. Ayaana lowered her head. Warm hands, soft touch. The ocean still asked, Ni shi shei? Insects fluttered. Lai Jin’s gaze followed the flight of a bee. “Soon the dragonflies?”

  Ayaana nodded. “Their destiny is kept by the wind; they must return.” The lilt of her Kipate voice reshaped her Mandarin. “But they don’t stay,” she added.