She must have screamed. It was Mohammad who found her. Mohammad who put his arm around Jane and helped her shaking legs find their way back inside to that shadowy stuffy hall. Mohammad who brought her a blanket and a glass of water, and Mohammad who held Jane’s secret closely tucked away so that it never saw light. When Paul finally came home that evening, Jane was curled like a snail on the floor, eyes tightly shut. She felt him crouching next to her and heard him breathing quietly as he tiptoed away. She wished he’d sit next to her and stay, that he’d smooth back the sweaty hair from her cheeks and tell her it would all be fine, just fine.
That night Jane and Paul picked at a cold dinner of leftovers at their dining room table. They kept the light off and lit candles. Throughout the meal, fear coiled in Jane’s belly. She started at every loud sound and avoided making too much noise. She listened to Paul talking with one part of herself, and with the other part Jane listened to the silence beyond their walls, beyond their locked gate, beyond the sounds of surf on the beach, out to where the sun was sinking into the horizon in a puddle of disappearing light and the dark was rolling in.
Jane told Paul about the baby a few days later; she just blurted it out at breakfast, nothing special. He was thrilled; he couldn’t wait to be a father. But he still didn’t stay inside with her after dinner to watch a movie or talk. In the following weeks the government stabilized, the curfew lifted and the Charlies returned. They came up the steps and waited. Mohammad whispered, “Sir, they are here.” But Jane didn’t join Paul on the back porch anymore. She sat in the living room pretending to read, plugging her ears and forcing herself to breathe when she thought she heard the sound of bullets whizzing through the air on the beach. Before Jane drifted off to sleep at night, she didn’t think about the mask anymore. Instead, she saw herself watching silently through the railings as those men in their droopy pants, with their glistening skin and bewildered eyes, were shot.
Jane didn’t go to the beach anymore, either. On clear Saturdays, Paul would try to tempt her with the suggestion of ocean swimming, picnics on the sand, kite flying. She never agreed. She used the pregnancy as her excuse—she didn’t feel well, she wanted to stay inside. He didn’t know what she knew: that the ocean had licked blood from the shoreline, that the blood swirled in the water now; there were bullets; there were beads of flesh rotting under the sand. The beach was a decaying thing, marked by violence, and Jane didn’t want any part of it—any molecules of sea or silica or even the air off the waves—to melt through her skin or lungs and dissolve into her baby. She had to be a wall now, between her baby and the tragic world they lived in.
GOD IS THE RAIN, GOD IS THE SKY
The air was cooler in the hills, easier to breathe. Simi concentrated on that, the rhythm of her breath. She kept her eyes cast downward and tried not to think about the distance she’d come from the manyatta, or the length of the return journey. She walked as fast as she could, but she was still weak and empty and her legs felt heavy and slow. The prospect of a night out in the bush, alone, wasn’t one she relished, so she didn’t stop to rest her legs or to drink water. The path was rocky, and a long ago rain cut a deep track in the dirt. It was too narrow for her to walk in, so she tried to straddle it. Occasionally one foot would slip, causing her to stumble.
Around her, the world changed. Her path led upward, away from the yellow savannah spread out below her and up into the Loita hills. The scrub gradually became taller, and greener, and the plant life changed. After a while, Simi noticed she couldn’t see down the escarpment into the savannah anymore. The trees along the path were too thick now, too tall. Even the sun was hidden behind them. Far above her tree branches rustled and shook with the weight of colobus monkeys that leaped between them, hooting warnings to each other as Simi crossed under them. Once, Simi looked up to see a mother colobus launch herself from one branch to another, the long, white fur stripes along her sides and tail streaming out behind her, while a tiny baby clung bravely to her breast. Even when the branches were still, Simi could feel the peering eyes of monkeys all around her. The forest breathed, and its heart beat; it was a unified body that lived and moved, its cells the countless creatures and plants that made it, and the rocks and the dirt and the air.
The part of the forest body Simi looked for was the large oreteti tree she’d visited six years ago when she first realized she might be barren. That time, she’d come with other women. They’d eaten fat and cleansed themselves with milk. They danced and sang songs and then each woman left an offering at the tree. Some of the women left calabashes of milk; one left a tin of sugar. Simi couldn’t remember if all of the other women had later given birth, but she knew some had.
Even after six years, it was easy to find the tree. It was as wide as Simi’s hut and stretched so far up that even when she tipped her head all the way back she couldn’t see where the branches met the sky. This was an old tree. The oreteti begins as a seed dropped into the branches of another tree by a bird or a monkey. The seed breaks open and tiny roots grow. As the roots gather nutrients from their host, they grow bigger, and longer, and more plentiful, wrapping the host tree in python-sized roots that seem to descend from the sky itself. The host tree struggles to survive the oreteti’s embrace, but eventually dies and rots away, leaving an enormous, intricate lattice of great roots that curl and crawl over one another as they push themselves higher and higher from the earth to the sky.
Simi knelt down in the soft earth at the base of the tree. She stilled her breathing and licked her dry lips. The oreteti commanded respect and reverence. It was through an oreteti tree’s roots that N’gai handed the cattle from heaven into the care of the Maasai. The roots could also take prayers to N’gai, who shares a name with the rain and also the sun. Years ago, Simi put her faith in this tree. She danced and sang and made her own offering. But the tree hadn’t taken her prayer to N’gai. Or N’gai hadn’t wanted to give her what she sought. Instead, he’d only taunted her—giving her a full womb and then emptying it again and again, like water poured from a calabash. Then a baby had come. Not one grown in her own body, but a baby all the same. But that was a taunt, too, and now, like all the others, that baby was gone.
Simi stood. The tree loomed above her, its countless arms snaking in and around and over each other. In between the woven roots, Simi knew, was a dark, empty space where the host tree used to be. Last time she was here, her desperation made her brave. The other women implored her not to—there were surely snakes hiding there, they’d cried, maybe a leopard. But she’d slipped in between the roots and entered the tree’s middle space. Now she remembered the feeling of peace that came over her then. She wasn’t frightened that day. The other women chatted nearby, and their voices had been comforting. She was safe, she felt, in the belly of the sacred tree, and she lowered herself and sat on her haunches and prayed there, in the dark. The women’s voices faded, and all she could hear was the sound of the leaves so far above her in that dark hollow. When her prayer ended, she’d reached up to her neck, unlatched the necklace of blue and green beads her mother had given her and laid it on the ground. Six years ago she’d offered her most valued possession in the hope that N’gai would bless her with children. She’d placed it directly in the heart of the oreteti. But N’gai hadn’t blessed her. And now she wanted her offering back.
In the time since she was here with the other women, the tree had grown many more winding roots. The space she’d slipped through before was now crossed over by new growth that barred her entry. Simi carefully examined the tree. The side that faced the path was covered tightly, and around the other side, a tangle of undergrowth obscured the tree’s base. Simi slipped her machete from the leather band around her waist. Her heart beat painfully in her chest. The forest was full of animals, from snakes to leopards, and any of them could be hiding in the bush. The bravery she felt with the other women was gone now.
Slowly Simi picked her way around the tree, sliding the
branches and leaves out of her way with the blade of her machete. She examined the tree as she moved, looking for an opening she could access. It didn’t take long to find one. It was off the ground, though—she’d have to sidle up the large roots, slide into the opening and then drop back onto the ground in the middle of the tree. It wasn’t so high that the drop would hurt her, but it might be difficult to climb back out.
An image of the car, carrying her daughter and disappearing into a cloud of dust that choked her, flashed through her mind. What did she have to lose, anyway? Who would miss her? She told nobody she was leaving just after dawn that day. She told nobody where she was going. It didn’t matter. Now, childless again and far past hope that she could ever conceive, she wouldn’t be missed. In fact, she wasn’t sure her husband wouldn’t cast her out, anyway. An unlucky, cursed woman like her.
Simi took hold of the tree, one serpentine root in each hand, and hoisted herself up. She was weak from days without eating, and her arms barely held her. But she found footing on a lower root and pushed herself upward. The opening she wanted was just above her head. Once Simi grasped the root that formed the bottom edge of the space, it was easy for her bare feet to find secure places to stand, and slowly she worked her way up until her chest rested on the bottom of the open space. She leaned over and peered down into the center of the tree. It was quiet. No sound of an animal breathing. No dry rasp of a snake slithering below her. Dim light entered from the spaces between the filigree of roots, but there were puddles of shadows she couldn’t see into. She wished she had fire to illuminate the space, but she didn’t want to take the time to find the wood to make a spark. She knew if she found the necklace soon, and hurried back through the forest, she could be down the escarpment before dark. She could ask to stay at the nearest manyatta for the night.
So she moved quickly, pushing herself up and sliding the front of her body forward, then grasping the top edge of the opening and pulling her legs up so she was sitting on its edge, her back to the forest and her feet dangling into the darkness. She slid forward and dropped into the space. Her feet hit solid ground, and she braced herself for the sharpness of fangs in her ankle, or the slipping of a centipede against her toes. Nothing. She stood for a second, letting her eyes adjust to the minimal light, which fell in soft shafts, echoing the shapes the tangle of roots made all around her. She leaned her head back and looked up. The tree was taller than she remembered, the top invisible to her. The original roots, born in an upper branch of the host tree, were thicker than they were at the base, and so closely entwined they allowed no light to enter.
She waited to see if the feeling of calm she’d felt the first time she slipped into the heart of this tree would fill her again. Her head, whether light from lack of food and the long walk up the escarpment that day or from the dizzying effect of the light through the tree, spun. She knelt down in the dirt to steady herself and took a deep breath. The spinning slowed, and Simi looked around, hoping her eyes would adjust to the low light. She didn’t think the necklace would be hard to find. She’d only placed it on the ground, not in a hole or in some divot of the trunk that would have grown taller and taken the necklace with it. Slowly, Simi leaned forward and stretched her arms out, carefully patting the ground all around her. Six years of dust had gathered here since last time, as a hopeful young wife, she came here in an act of faith. She’d assumed the offering would work, and that soon enough her empty belly would fill with children and her life would spin out the way she, her mother, her father and everyone else expected it to.
Remembering that hope, and the way it slowly gave way to disappointment, made Simi feel weak again. It had been upsetting enough to be unable to bear a child, but shouldering the expectations of generations of ancestors who expected her life to unfold in a certain way made it worse. It wasn’t simply the absence of a baby, but also the absence of a place. Before Adia, Simi had lived with a constant undercurrent of fear. She never knew if she’d be forced to leave; if the others would begin to see her bad luck as catching—as a curse on all of them. And when Adia came to her, the fear vanished. She had a baby to love and a secure place in the community. She’d been just another mother, not someone to look at sideways and wonder about. Adia. Simi remembered the weight of Adia’s infant body in her arms, the way Adia curled next to her as she slept and the way her little voice sounded when she spoke. Grief rolled over her with the force of a beast attacking her. She felt her chest collapse into the dirt. For an instant she thought it really was a big cat, and she imagined she could feel the creature’s hot, fetid breath on her neck and its claws tearing her skin. She couldn’t breathe. Her lungs constricted and terror filled her. Light popped behind her eyes, and heat flashed like fire across the surface of her skin. She thought she was dying, and she tucked her body around itself and held her head in her arms, the instinct for self-preservation too strong to deny.
She must have faded into sleep, because when she opened her eyes, it was completely dark. Every light had faded into blackness. She wiggled her toes, and felt the sensation along her legs, and stretched her arms wide. Everything moved just as it should. Simi was tired. Too tired to make the effort to rise. If darkness had fallen, she couldn’t risk a walk back through the forest, anyway. She let her body relax again. Every piece of her was still. She made no movement except for the rising and falling of her breath. The panic was gone now; the fear had left. She only felt resigned. Her life wasn’t what she’d planned. The children weren’t coming. Adia was gone. There was nothing she could do about it. Her husband might or might not shun her, and she might or might not be mauled by a lion on her way to the river one day. Things happened all the time that were out of anyone’s control.
She thought of the moon she’d observed the night before and how, underneath it, she’d noticed that the animals were dying again, the drought slowly killing them off, and how the woman had to go farther and farther to collect firewood and how men were leaving their traditions behind to find work and money in Nairobi. Her life wasn’t the only one that didn’t continue the pattern of all the lives that had come before. Nobody’s future was written from the past. She remembered when Leona first arrived, she told Simi she wanted to help the Maasai hold on to their traditions by figuring out ways to graze their livestock in places the drought hadn’t reached.
Thinking about Leona threatened despair, and to quell those dangerous thoughts, Simi shifted her body, just a bit, to relieve her hip bones of the ache the cold ground had sown in them. As she shifted, her left arm, still stretched out its full length, shifted, too. The fingers on her left hand moved, and under them Simi felt something that wasn’t dirt. The dark was too thick to see the colors, but Simi felt the details. All the beads were there. The clasp still seemed to work. Simi sat up and fastened the necklace around her neck. Her mother had wanted Simi’s life to be different. That’s why she’d worked so hard to get Simi to school. She couldn’t imagine her daughter not marrying or being cut, but she’d wanted her daughter to have a modern mind, to go one step further than the women of her own generation. How odd that a muzungu was working so hard to try to preserve their way of life, while Simi’s own mother had injected change, however small.
Simi was grateful for her mother’s vision. She thought that, if she’d had a daughter, she would have taken one step even further into the future. Her daughter, the one she didn’t have, would get an education and Simi would make sure she finished. That’s how she would keep her mother’s vision passing into the future.
Simi wrapped her shuka tightly around her shoulders and, within the secure confines of the oreteti, curled herself into a ball. One last thought flipped into her mind before she drifted off—if she had that daughter and if she encouraged that daughter to finish secondary school, when would that girl be cut? Cutting signified a girl’s readiness to marry, and usually she became a bride quickly afterward. Would she still be cut at thirteen, but wait to marry? Would a husband be willing
to wait? Or, would the girl be cut after secondary school? It made an extraordinary picture in Simi’s mind—an older girl, one of seventeen or eighteen, educated, having emurata. It didn’t make sense; you might as well have a man nurse a baby or an old woman become a moran.
In the morning, the slow sun found its way back through the pattern of roots. Simi opened her eyes and the bits of light were like stars. The forest around her was already awake, the colobus monkeys were busy searching for breakfast and the birds called to each other, gossiping in the chilly air. Simi’s back hurt from the way she’d curled up to sleep, but she was rested. She felt an emptiness that she hadn’t felt in the previous few days. That is, she didn’t feel happy, but she felt an absence of the deep grief Adia’s leaving gave her. It was still there, she knew, but it had settled into a deeper place, the way a stone, after it’s tossed into water, settles on the river’s floor, leaving no traces of itself when the ripples smooth out.
It wasn’t as hard as Simi expected to climb back out of the space in the tree, nor for her to start walking back toward her manyatta. And once she passed the outer edge of the forest and broke back into the open sky with the wide savannah stretched out below her, she paused and sat on a large stone. She unclasped the necklace and examined it. The beads were dirty—all those six years of dirt clustered in the spaces between them—but, as she had thought the night before, they were all there. Simi used the bottom edge of her kanga and rubbed at the beads, dislodging the dirt bit by bit. She rubbed until she could see the colors of the beads, blue for the sky and rain that should have come, green for the way the land would look if it did. When it was clean, she clasped it back around her neck and began her long walk home.
The Brightest Sun Page 11