The Dragonfly Sea

by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

  In the hour before dawn, Lai Jin, with a simple sarong around his waist, and Ayaana, in a floaty flowered nightgown that belonged to Delaksha, sat on a chair to look at the Zao Wou-Ki. Lai Jin had placed Ayaana on his lap and wrapped his arms around her; his nose was on her skin, finding faint traces of her rose scent. Connecting with skin, to feel curves again, to touch the slenderness of a woman’s waist. He looked at his hands on her body, how strong and big they looked. His nose was in her hair.

  Ayaana said, “When stars fall near water, they turn into sand.”

  Lai Jin grasped her hand. “I’ve seen stars fall.”

  “Why do they fall?” she asked.

  He bent her head with his, and leaned close to whisper into her ear the words for “red,” “white,” “black,” “blue,” and “orange” in Mandarin: “Hong se, bai se, hei se, lan se, cheng se.” He rocked both their bodies in rhythm with the ocean; his hands gripping her hips, fingers digging into flesh, he repeated the words until he could no longer speak.

  * * *

  —

  Later in the day, Ayaana memorized these colors. She drew pictograms on scraps of paper: 红色, 白色, 黑色, 蓝色, 橙色. Lai Jin oversaw her refinement of the lines on the 橙色.“蜻蜓,” he added, leaning over her, breathing into her ear. “This is how to write ‘dragonfly.’ ” Qingting. She remembered.

  * * *

  “Deng yixia,” Lai Jin said. Wait.

  Ayaana had said, “Today I return to my space.”

  Lai Jin had choked, “Deng yixia.”

  Ayaana hovered close to the door. His right hand was on the small of her back. She leaned back into him. “Deng yixia,” she murmured to herself.

  * * *

  —

  The steward delivered an early dinner tray to the cabin door. There was a special jug of custard-apple juice. After dinner, Lai Jin and Ayaana lay in the cabin bed, spooned, skin to skin, warmed bodies, not thinking. Lai Jin’s pale skin, Ayaana’s brown one. She rubbed her body against his, nipping at skin, surprised by the ceaselessness of human craving, all its variety. Cutting binds and bonds. She should have worried. She did not—not in the capsule she had stepped into. You are young, Lai Jin told himself. I’m only passing by. She felt the warning in her spirit, and a hollow ache formed within her belly. I cannot stay. He was retreating to a refuge of remoteness. My only wife is the sea, is in the sea.

  [ 49 ]

  Before dawn, when the djinns should have started their wailing, another Ayaana opened the captain’s cabin door to make sense of the world. New moods in the freshness of the morning; she was engulfed by sensations, the spirit of change, the sense of pain of a different sort of leave-taking. She inhaled the air and watched the passing morning birds. She leaned over the railings to peer at the thin strip of light from the approaching day.

  Ni shi shei? The sea reached up to touch her. Ayaana wandered along the deck and smelled rich tobacco wafting in the air, then heard Delaksha laugh from inside Nioreg’s cabin. She passed Teacher Ruolan’s corner to reach her room. She turned the door handle. Nothing. Locked. When she turned, Lai Jin was there. “Your key,” he said.

  She took it.

  He waited fifteen seconds before turning away. The opened cage. She stepped into the room, and noticed the crowdedness of its China images. She looked at the likeness of Admiral Zheng He. She stooped over her mother’s prayer mat. Everything in the room was exactly as it had been before the storm.

  She wasn’t.

  * * *

  —

  That evening, Ayaana returned to Lai Jin’s cabin, henna kit in hand. She had spent the day in her cabin, painting her feet, washing her body and hair with her Pate Island oils.

  Henna was the preserve of women.

  But.

  On her knees now, Ayaana stroked the naked, supple body of a man in the golden light of a sea evening. Lai Jin rested his head on his arms as she touched the burned portions of his skin and told Lai Jin the stories of Pate that she had lived, and that she had heard. She was drawing on the parts of his body that clothes would later shield from the outsider’s gaze: his back, his front, the top part of his thighs. She spoke. “My town lives inside the ghost of a city that was the center of the world,” she said. “Many come to stay.” She spoke of Muhidin. “I chose my father. His name is Muhidin.” Traversing scars. “Munira, my mother, is the best singer in Lamu Island, except nobody knows but her and me.” She covered Lai Jin’s body from below the neck with lotuses and whorls. He listened to her; felt the tickle of Ayaana’s brush and the cold liquid on his fire-smoothed skin. She inscribed Pate there with her voice. Transferring memory. “Wings,” she said, “like dragonflies.” When she finished, she leaned over Lai Jin to kiss the scars on the side of his face. She stroked his head and told him to remain where he was for at least an hour before washing off the excess. Then she gathered what was hers and left the cabin.

  * * *

  —

  Ayaana opened the door of her cabin at dawn.

  Zar. It was turning to light when she heard the djinns sob.

  * * *

  —

  She is young, Lai Jin told himself, his eyes watering. Her destiny is her own.

  Maji hufuata mkondo.

  Water follows the current.

  [ 50 ]

  Ayaana left her cabin at nine in the morning. She wore a flowing white blouse with stonewashed jeans. She was barefoot. Her hair was in a topknot. She skipped breakfast. She carried her lesson books and went to wait for Teacher Ruolan in the lesson room. As was her habit, Teacher Ruolan showed up on time. She found Ayaana seated. She stiffened, did not comment on the girl’s bare feet. She recovered. Fingers trembling, she turned the pages of a reference book. She said, “In our last lesson, we learned about China stars; our Tou Mou, empress star. It never sets.” Ayaana picked up a blue pen with which to take notes. She remembered again, that sometimes, when stars fall, they become sea sand.

  * * *

  —

  Captain Lai Jin resumed his place at the bridge. He was as competent as always. He acted as if the storm had not happened.

  * * *

  —

  Delaksha leapt at Ayaana as they met on their way to dinner. Oozing a heavy dose of rose fragrance, she grabbed Ayaana in a tight hug and exclaimed, “You! Silly, silly thing! What were you thinking, wandering about in a bloody storm? You were rather dead when they found you, lady. Scared the shit out of me!”

  Ayaana touched Delaksha’s face. Ortolan bunting, she thought. Delaksha squinted at Ayaana. “Oh, my dear, dear!” Delaksha called out to Nioreg. “Nio, look! Here! Our migrant bird has reincarnated.”

  Nioreg nodded at Ayaana, his look enigmatic. “Bonsoir. You’re well. Good.”

  Delaksha said, “Nio, darling, so effusive.”

  Nioreg kissed Delaksha on her forehead.

  Ayaana smiled. “Where is the bird?”

  Delaksha answered amid the clatter of cutlery and crockery in the mess and galley: “The sweet wretch. After feasting and drinking with us, and enjoying asylum as we processed its visa, no sooner did the storm cease than she flew away. She did offer us a backward glance, didn’t she, Nio?” Laughter. “Odd being.” Pause. “Do tell, little Ayaana,” Delaksha continued, “what is our lofty captain like at close quarters? He was soooo protective of you—took your almost death rather badly. Not as if you wanted to kill yourself to spite him. Had to tell him so.”

  Ayaana’s stomach did a flip. She blanked her face to look at Delaksha. Camouflage. “Nice,” Ayaana said.

  Delaksha sighed. “By ‘nice’ you mean inarticulate bore. Oh well! Come! Let’s eat dumplings. I swear I’ll never eat another dumpling in my life after this. Nio was telling me about the Maersk Dubai. Ever hear about the evil ship? Diabolical captain. Disgusting. Chinese.”

  “Taiwanese,” Nioreg correc
ted.

  “Same difference,” continued Delaksha. “Demonic. Had to get Nio to guarantee that our captain did not feed you to the piranhas. Didn’t I, Nio?”

  “Yes,” sighed Nioreg. He turned to Ayaana. “She was in good hands.”

  Ayaana coughed. “Yes.”

  Nioreg added, “Delaksha, the sea does not have piranhas.”

  “I’m sure they exist; humans have just not spotted them yet,” Delaksha replied.

  They reached the table. The soup was already steaming in a large bowl. Delaksha brayed, “Ooh, look! Green squiggles gasping for breath in our soup. Hurry, Nioreg! Rescue them.” Delaksha was gurgling. “Darling girl, sit next to me.”

  Ayaana observed this Delaksha, in her bright gowns, her un-made-up face with its bright, clear eyes, her disheveled hair, and her glee. Her thorniness had vanished, as had her aura of suffering. Ayaana tilted her head to study Nioreg covertly. He seemed as unchanged as an old rock in the sea, but his equally bemused and amused gaze turned often to Delaksha. Ayaana turned to her soup and in it glimpsed a fragment of the Zao Wou-Ki, which had leached into her senses.

  * * *

  —

  Clang of heavy machinery, and the shouts of crew attending to invisible tasks. Inside the mess, at the table, Delaksha was speaking of purgatory again. Nioreg had spoken of security contracting—war profiteering, Delaksha had corrected him—in the world’s conflict arenas. He suggested that the truth of what humans had done in the world’s new wars would one day emerge; his look bereft and bleak, he swore that on that day human beings would conceal their faces from one another in existential shame. He would not explain what he meant.

  In the pause, Ayaana asked, “Why?”

  Nioreg said, “Make no mistake, little Ayaana, ‘man is a wolf to man’; there are no ‘good guys.’ ” His voice was dry when he added, “But the wolf is far more honorable; it hunts under a moral code.” Nioreg’s eyes had turned inward, bright and desperate. He murmured, “I am afraid we have bequeathed a wrecked world to your generation.”

  Delaksha punched Nioreg’s forearm. “You are not to scare her, Nio—you must not.”

  “Delaksha, chérie. It is good for her to lose her illusions now, here, with us.”

  Delaksha turned to Ayaana. “Years ago, I was in Rome with the beastie I married. I wandered out and happened upon a building with a white façade sandwiched between orange and brown edifices. It was a church.” Nioreg grunted. Delaksha pinched his hand. “Church of the Sacred Heart of the Suffrage.” Her voice lowered: “Dedicated to purgatory and its fires.”

  “What is…?” Ayaana started to ask.

  Delaksha cut in, “After-death space of purification and atonement…like a spa that uses fire as its only ingredient.” She glared at Nioreg, who had scoffed. “Purifies human rot and stains.” Ayaana leaned forward to listen. Delaksha continued, “The museo del purgatorio. Inside the church is a shrine to the stained who reach back to the earth with limbs of fire.”

  Nioreg’s sardonic “Ha!”

  Ayaana asked, “Why look back?”

  Delaksha cupped Ayaana’s face. “Souls”—she turned to glare at Nioreg—“require the help of the living—yes, Nioreg—to help them realize their eternity. They return to let us know—yes, Nioreg—that there is more to life than what we see.” Delaksha continued: “In that place, I understood that life is crafted from the foundation of second chances.”

  Nioreg grunted, “Delaksha, there’s no superlife, no afterlife, no…”

  She snapped, “Death?”

  “So what?” It was a bellow.

  Delaksha said, “Do you dare explain death?”

  “I know it annihilates life, Delaksha. I am an actor in our hideous human wars. There is no answer for the fire that turns a brother into a headless, roasted, bleeding meat chunk…Yes?”

  Delaksha rolled her eyes, unsympathetic. “What you mean is, you have not yet dreamed up a convenient mathematical formula to explain meaninglessness.” She turned back to Ayaana. “Women from our worlds have clearer, deeper, other senses. Keep yours, sweetheart, so that you will still see the message within shadows, darling. It is a power.” A pause. “Now let us eat and talk of other things…Nio, I’m not through with you yet…Look, Ayaana, noodles!”

  Ayaana smiled, but her thoughts were awhirr with new words to mull over. Purgatory. She stared at her soup with its wriggly green vegetable. Delaksha seemed to intuit her thoughts. She leaned over to whisper, “ ‘Love,’ honey, is mostly purgatory. It is one of the many versions of darkness.” Ayaana gave her a startled look. Delaksha smiled. “Tell me, sweetheart, what do you love best in the world right now?”

  Ayaana deflected: “Pate.”

  Delaksha said, “Never made it there. A pity.”

  Nioreg asked, “What’s to love?”

  The ideal of home, which distance amplified. Ayaana tuned into a vision of home as if she were a home-comer. Her face softened as she clothed her island in her mother’s scents and the Almighty’s stars. In Ayaana’s grammar, her listeners glimpsed Muhidin and Munira, witnessed the surge of Pate’s moonlit seas from a sand dune, and smelled a jasmine-infused night. Ayaana’s Pate was an antidote to desecrated worlds, so that, when Ayaana finished her remembering, there was silence. She picked up the chopsticks as the ocean whooshed answerless questions. Nioreg’s tough-man mask slipped. “Miss Ayaana, we shall visit your home, yes?” He turned to his meal.

  Delaksha took Ayaana’s hand. “Don’t let the world change you.” Delaksha was addressing both Ayaana and Pate.

  [ 51 ]

  He battled a sudden desire to abandon everything he knew to follow after the uncertainty of his untrustworthy emotions. Vague fears. Hanging on to the hermit-crab-shell scraps of life he had created for himself. The captain addressed his passengers in English: “We reach Xiamen in five days.” No emotion in his voice. He saw that Ayaana lowered her head. He turned away.

  * * *

  —

  Lai Jin approached her. “Walk with me.”

  They strode along the deck in silence. Then he said, “China will find China in you; you will also find your China self.”

  Exposed. Another rush of tears. Cuttlefish! she evoked desperately. Couldn’t she change shape and color and disappear into the scenery?

  Lai Jin said, “You will forget this?”

  “Yes,” she said, defying herself.

  They turned the corner, down a tight corridor, and he seized her there, hands wrapped in her thick hair, pushing his body against hers. She flinched in pain. She shuddered, reaching in to him, for him, swallowing fear.

  She was satin-skinned and young; she was tall and soft; and her eyes were inside his storm-shaken soul. He buried his head in her neck. Breathing hard. Her fingers found a way to his chest, down to his stomach, past it. For a minute, Lai Jin could hold her; he could hold on to her for sixty seconds. He breathed into her. “The world is waiting for you…and I…”

  Hurrying footsteps on the steel deck. They pulled away from each other. He quickly adjusted his clothes and hers. She stared into the pitiless moment, its facelessness, the way it scalded the deep-withins. Here were memories made out of a stinging scalp. What have I done? Lai Jin asked himself. Ayaana might have asked the same of herself.

  Maji hayakosi wimbi.

  Water always has waves.

  [ 52 ]

  The cargo was bleeding. The stench of rotting blood pervaded the ship. The night had been terrifying. Waves like towers—the ship had pitched. But now that it was almost calm, the cargo seemed to be bleeding. The chief officer dispatched a crew member to look. The man, a rough-looking unshaven giant, re-emerged half an hour later, looking wan. He spoke to the chief officer. The chief officer went straight to the bridge and asked to speak to the captain.

  * * *

  —

  Everyon
e gathered at the top deck in the rain and was looking down at the contents of three split containers. Five hundred death grimaces of African beings: lions, leopards, pangolins, zebras, and gazelles. Ayaana counted and recounted the elephant tusks. Not the giant ones, but the small, unformed ivory of young elephants. Some of the pangolin bodies moved—not yet dead—and that was the most distressing of all. There were things she had not known she believed in, had not imagined she might feel for. Had not understood she might ever weep for this, the evidence, of the wasteful plunder of the treasures of her homeland. Heaving, she battled to keep her breakfast in.

  * * *

  —

  The MV Qingrui/Guolong had slowed down to five knots. Delaksha started up the steps to the bridge, howling. Nioreg restrained her as she hurled, “You horrible, horrible, greedy little fascists. Murdering everything. Beauty-eating barbarians. Why don’t you die? Let me go!” she screamed at Nioreg, who was dragging her back. “Let me slaughter these shits. Original thieves! Is there nothing you would not desecrate? Ahh! Nioreg, stop protecting them!”

  Inside a mess, Captain Lai Jin heard echoes of Delaksha’s insults as he studied the cargo manifest for the fiftieth time. He paused to remind himself why, in normal circumstances, he never, ever traveled with passengers. Adjusting the papers in his hand, he observed again that the containers in question were listed under the tag “Scrap Metal.” Lai Jin focused on the name attached to the cargo list. It was an investment-and-trading company, and if public rumor served him right, it was linked to the powerful functionary Shanghai Accent. The man of prearranged sound bites that camouflaged intention.