by Leah Bassoff
“Poni,” she calls sharply to me.
“Auntie?” I cannot bring myself to call her Mama.
“Go and fetch firewood.”
“Yes,” I reply. Had it been my own mother who had asked, my feet would have flown. But my true mother is not here.
I begin to walk and, as I do, I see a small group of girls who have been sent on this same collecting mission. We regard each other warily, realizing that we will be competing over the scarce wood. I see the girls start to walk away from me, but then one of them seems to change her mind.
“There is safety in numbers,” she says. “Follow us.” We walk together, not so close as to speak to one another. Our eyes sweep back and forth, looking out for either wood or danger.
After walking for a time, we hear footsteps behind us.
“Turkana!” one of the girls cries out.
She need only utter this one word before all of us are running. The Turkana are nomadic herders, lawless and dangerous.
I run out ahead of the others. I see one of the girls trip behind me, the same girl who told me to follow her.
When a lion chases a pack of antelopes, all of them scatter except for the one the lion seizes and pulls down. This girl is that unlucky antelope. A man is on top of her.
I run and hide inside a prickly thorn bush. Then I put my hand over my own mouth to stifle the urge I have to cough and scream. The man’s blue-and-red-checked blanket falls over the girl like a net. I hear the man’s grunts, see him moving up and down like an animal devouring its prey, and then he is gone.
I want to go to the girl, but there is nothing I can do to help her now.
The girl doesn’t cry. Her legs wobble as she tries to stand, and she looks dazed. But she does get up. She gets up and, after wiping herself off, starts to look for firewood. She still needs that wood.
I know what will happen to her. She will be blamed for her own rape. No one will want to marry her, and people will call her malaya, a prostitute.
I wait until the girl is gone before I come out of the bush and begin looking for my own sticks.
Of course it could have been me who tripped, me who got caught. Yet I also know my fast running saved me. “You were born running,” my mother used to say. The women around the village used to laugh to see me run.
———
I RETURN TO LORIHO later that evening carrying a few thin sticks. Despite the fact that my skin is already cut and my lip is torn from hiding in the thorny bush, Loriho takes an acacia branch and beats me across the shoulders.
“What took you so long?” she demands. It is not like when Mama used to beat me and would give me tea and sugar afterwards, her secret way of telling me that I was still loved. This woman continues to give me a sharp eye even after she is done with her caning.
That night, as I am sleeping, I wake suddenly to find my foster mother standing over me. I suck in my breath. She cannot possibly want to beat me at this time of night, can she?
Instead she kneels down next to me. Her eyes are unfocused, making me wonder if something is wrong with her. My heart is pumping hard, and I am too afraid to let her know that I am awake, so I lie there, eyelids fluttering.
“Nakang, daughter of mine,” my foster mother says. She sucks on her fingers, then runs them over my face. “I am wiping tears from your face, Nakang.”
Nakang? My foster mother, walking in her sleep, must think I am the daughter she lost. Am I the daughter’s same age? Despite the fact that I have no fondness for my foster mother, I cannot help pitying her. Though it disgusts me, I allow her to trail her wet fingers over my face.
Let her believe, just for the night, that this daughter is still alive.
The next day, my foster mother seems to have no memory of her nighttime activities. Before sending me out for water, she tells me, “You will soon be married to a man here in Kakuma. I will find someone who can offer a bride price.”
I turn my head away from her so she cannot see the burning in my eyes.
I will beat anyone who tries to claim me as a wife. I have done it before.
— 14 —
AT FIRST I LOOK FOR my family constantly. I look everywhere. My eyes never stop searching. But I lose a bit of hope every day, until gradually, I am left with nothing, only a carved-out spot inside of me. I get to where I no longer expect to see anyone, to where I barely raise my head.
Perhaps this is why, when I look up one day and see Lokure standing before me, I think he must be a ghost. My whole body begins to tremble.
“Poni, is it you?” he asks, as if he, too, cannot believe it.
“It is me,” I say. How can I explain that I am me but not me, that I am a completely different version of the girl he once knew?
I recall a time when I shouted insults straight into Lokure’s face: “Skinny! Ugly!” Now I can only imagine how I must appear to him, my hair yellowed, my body that of a dried-out lemon.
Seeing Lokure fills me with too many emotions at once. I am relieved that he is alive, more relieved than I care to admit. Yet I am also filled with embarrassment, as if I should confess all the imaginary conversations I had with him inside my head.
I want to confess everything to him. I want to tell him that back when I was walking those hundreds of miles across the desert, I watched an old woman die sitting up. Our group had stopped in order to let this woman rest. She died clutching a crust of bread someone had thrust upon her in the hopes that this small bit of sustenance might prevent her death. No one else noticed her die. The line between barely alive and barely dead was as tiny as a breath itself.
Nor did anyone see how I crept over to her, then took the bread out of her hands and put it into my own mouth.
I remember how the bread tasted, like tears.
How can I explain to Lokure that the love letter he wrote me so long ago, along with the bread out of a just-dead woman’s hands, helped me survive days and nights of shuffling across the desert? Lokure’s words replaced the other ones that kept pounding through my head, the ones that told me to just lie down and let death brush over me like sand.
Lokure’s words were what kept me on my feet. Somehow his words kept me from thinking about the fact that my feet no longer had skin on the bottom or that my tongue was so torn that I might never use it again. They reminded me that somewhere there was still beauty to be found.
I want to tell everything to Lokure, to have him absolve me, but perhaps he has his own cross to bear. After all, how did he manage to walk all this way on those stick-skinny legs of his?
I remember when I beat him. Now I want to do the opposite, to wipe the dust from his face, to polish his face with my fingers.
Too overwhelmed to say any of this, I ask about his family instead.
“Your sister? What became of your sister?” I am cautious when I ask this question, knowing that the news might be bad. Indeed it is. I can tell by the way Lokure pulls me to sit on the ground with him. It is easier to discuss bad news down low where your knees won’t buckle.
“One of the murahaleen, an Arab militia man on a horse, came and took her.” His voice is too many things at once when he speaks. Within it I can hear the sound of mothers keening. “Yes,” Lokure says. “This horseman picked her up and disappeared. He had a gun. All I could do was watch him leave.”
Lele. I remember her, how she used to follow Lokure everywhere.
“You are not to blame, Lokure.”
But I can see he doesn’t believe me. I see the shame he carries. I carry it, too.
The night our village was bombed I heard Mama yell, “Run,” so I did. I ran as fast as I could without looking back.
Why do I remember so few details about a night when I lost my mother, father, brothers and sister at once? I remember sounds — the sound of bombing, which was so loud that I could not hear out of my left ear for days. I can pi
cture Nakiru, one of our neighbors, bent over her leg with a look of sheer confusion on her face because her leg no longer had a foot attached to it. It was as if someone had played a trick on her, had grabbed her foot and run off with it.
This I remember, yet so many other memories are gone, as if someone came and snatched them, just like Nakiru’s leg.
Mama used to explain how women endure childbirth. “When something is so painful, you push this pain away, then bury it. You bury it in a spot so deep that even you cannot find it. This is how women are able to bear so many children, how the impossible becomes possible, something too big coming through something too small.”
Looking into Lokure’s eyes, I can tell that he suffers the opposite problem. He remembers too much. Men do not know this trick of women, the trick of making things disappear. Lokure seems to be trapped under memories so heavy that they push down on his eye sockets. Our men do not cry, not usually, but Lokure looks as though he is fighting back tears, the way he keeps gulping hard, as if he is swallowing stones.
“I saw Lele’s face, just before the militia man rode off with her. She wasn’t fighting back. She looked limp, almost dead,” he says.
My mind flashes back to Nadai, to how she desperately clung to the tree trying to keep from being pulled off it. Then I picture Lele making her body limp, playing dead while the militia man carted her off. Maybe this was her only way of fighting back.
“Where did this horseman take her?”
“That was the last time I saw her before the village was bombed and we began to walk. After my sister disappeared, Mama took a rock and pounded it into her own forehead until blood poured into her eyes. I sat with her all the rest of that day making sure that, wherever she sat, there were no stones within her reach.
“When the bombs came, Mama and I walked together for a few days, but then one day she refused to walk anymore. She had terrible stomach cramps, and her hands were shaking. I tried to coax her to keep going. I even told her lions would surely come eat her if she didn’t move more quickly, but she kept begging me to let her sit, to keep going without her. My mother said, ‘Please, since you were little, I nursed you and gave you everything you wanted. I have never asked you for anything until now, and what I am asking is that you leave me and run on ahead.’ When she begged me this way, I felt I couldn’t disrespect her wishes. Though it nearly killed me to do so, I left her with a group of women who promised to look after her, and then I ran on ahead. I ran away knowing that I was most likely leaving my mother to her death.”
“Lokure, I, too, ran ahead.” It is all I can manage to tell him. Our knees are nearly touching as we sit talking. I steal looks at his dark eyes, the lids swollen around them. These are eyes that can no longer close all the way, eyes that have been on guard for too long.
“And your family, Poni? Where are your mother and father?” he asks me.
“I don’t know,” I tell him. I explain how I have traveled alone, how I have now been assigned a foster mother. “A thorn in my foot, that one. She will beat me if I’m gone too long.”
“Let’s meet again,” he tells me. “Return to this very spot tonight. I have something to give you.”
I am mystified. Something to give me? None of us has more than our battered tin cups for food, our bits of corrugated metal for our shelter. Though it is unwise to go and meet any boy alone at night, how can I refuse this boy with the beautiful words who, despite everything I did to him, seems to have forgiven me.
“Maybe I will meet you,” I tell him, knowing full well that I wouldn’t miss our meeting for anything.
———
THAT NIGHT, I TELL my foster mother that I need to collect more firewood. Of course this is a strange lie, since no one goes out past dark for this purpose. However, since the incident when she sat over me and ran her wet fingers across my face, I have learned that nighttime is Loriho’s tough time, the time when she talks to the ghost of her lost daughter.
Sure enough, she doesn’t even look up when I walk past her.
I make my way cautiously to the place where I first spotted Lokure. You have to be careful at night. When the sun goes down, there is sometimes violence among the different groups — Somalis, Rwandans, Ugandans, Congolese, Turkana — who are now forced to live near one another. Because the askari, the Kenyan police, are so outnumbered, at night they hunker down within their station, refusing to come out even if there are riots outside.
How can peace ever exist when there are so many conflicts even here in Kakuma? Just the other week, a group of Somalis killed two of our boys right inside the camp, strung them up in the tree Jesus-style, the skin of their arms pinned back and stretched like the wings of birds.
The Somalis shouted insults. “Don’t bury those boys in the Muslim section of camp.” During all of this the police were sitting in their station with the door locked. No one wanted to take the dead boys down from the trees, thinking it might bring bad luck. Who finally did, I can’t say. However, even after the bodies were laid out, we were too scared to hold a funeral service for them, too afraid the Somalis would use this as an excuse to come back and kill more of us.
I spot Lokure sitting so still that I wonder if he is asleep. I make sure I walk in front of him where he can see me. After living in the bush, after learning to keep our ears pricked for wild-animal noises or militia, most of us get startled if approached from behind.
“Lokure,” I say, causing him to look up. “You said you wanted to give me something, but I can’t begin to imagine what it could be.”
Lokure reaches into the waistband of his pants — pants that barely keep themselves up around his skinny hips — and hands me a book.
A book? I stare at it.
“On my way to Kakuma, we walked through a village that had been abandoned, nearly burnt to the ground, but the schoolhouse still stood. I walked through the rubble and found this.”
“What book is this?” I still can’t believe it.
He looks down and reads its title to me, though it is obvious he knows it by memory. “Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. This book changed my life,” he tells me. “As I walked across the desert, whenever I had time to stop and rest, I would read this. I read when I was meant to be guarding the rest of our group from lions or hyenas. I read when I was meant to be listening for enemies. Reading helped me calm my fears, to lose myself a bit. I even trained myself to read in the dark.”
He puts the book in my hands, then folds my fingers over it as if I will not know what to do with the book otherwise.
“I remember you as being someone who possesses a fine love for learning, Poni,” he tells me. “You should read this when you can.”
“How do you know this about me?”
“Know what?”
“About my love of learning?”
“I watched so many other girls drop out of school. But you were one of the last ones standing.”
What should I feel towards Lokure? The war has taught me to trust no one, and yet here he is offering me a most precious gift, a book that survived the bombings just like us.
“Lokure?” The shrillness of my voice makes him flinch, as though he expects me to hit him as I have in the past. Instead what I say is, “I am glad to see you alive and safe.”
He smiles then. His lips are as dry and cracked as the muddy ground, but his smile is easy.
“Do read the book, Poni. You will see why I carried it with me this entire time.” He adds, “The last part is torn away, but most of the story is still there.”
———
THAT NIGHT, AS I ENTER our shelter, I can see the full moon through the piece of metal we use as a roof, metal that my foster mother says only keeps out every other raindrop during those rare times when it does rain. Certainly the metal does nothing to keep the dust out when the wind blows.
Back home, some of our elders practiced
magic. Some could hold their breath under water or bring about the rain. A person can train his body to do all manner of inhuman things — live without food, walk without stopping. Perhaps it should come as no surprise to me that Lokure trained himself to read in darkness.
I squint at the pages. Sure enough, despite the blackness surrounding me, the words eventually pierce through.
Reading Achebe’s book, I am transported to a Nigerian tribe, the Igbo, different and yet not so different from my own Didinga people. This story is the first time I have ever known an actual African to write about his experience.
Silently, I acknowledge that I owe much to Lokure for teaching me this new trick of reading in the dark. Stare at the words hard enough, and they eventually take shape. Water from a stone, visible from the invisible.
I don’t know what to do with the gratitude I feel towards him. It would be simpler if I didn’t owe him anything. Yet as I read, I cannot stop my fond feelings towards Lokure — he who magically pulled a book from the rubble, whose eyes read the same pages I am now reading, whose hands fingered the same pages I am now fingering. But it is also Achebe’s book that is making me happy for the first time in so long. Falling into this story allows me to forget my actual life for a while.
For the next few evenings, I spend every free moment I have with the book. Then I reach the book’s end, but it is not really the end, only the part where the rest of the book got torn away.
“No,” I whisper to myself. Of all the indignities I have suffered, this one is very bad. To be given a taste of something and yet not be allowed to drink one’s fill. You would think I would be accustomed to this by now, that I would grow used to being thirsty, but it still hurts. The fact that I cannot find out how the book ends, that I am left stranded, fills me with longing and rage.
I am half tempted to find Lokure and, like the old days, thrash him. “How can you cheat me this way? Do you think it’s a funny joke to give me a book with no ending?” I calm myself instead and resolve that some day I will escape from Kakuma. Some day I will find a way out. And, when I do, I will find the rest of the book.