The Dragonfly Sea

by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

  * * *

  —

  Two early mornings later, Mzee Kitwana and Muhidin set sail on a rehabilitated mtepe. No one thought to worry about them until four days had passed and their phone signals had ceased. Passing fishermen did say that, two days before, blue phosphorescence had covered the night waters and blinked out unfathomable messages, but of Muhidin and Mzee Kitwana, nothing. A flotilla went out to search. On the sixth day, Fundi Almazi Mehdi gave himself the heart-shattering task of calling Munira to tell her Muhidin had not returned from the sea.

  * * *

  —

  After hearing the news, Munira had waited a day before phoning Ayaana’s university. She had begged the authorities to guarantee that someone would be with Ayaana when they gave her the message. The university, for whom little was secret, had enlisted Koray’s help for the task.

  * * *

  In a hard-angled rectangular room, full of green files on shelves and smelling of just-eaten pork shu mai, the light fell golden and soft on the corduroy-wearing message-giver’s face, making his lips glow pink. Ayaana experienced the delicacy of this culture, how a people reshaped their bodies to convey bad news. Husky-toned formality that contained the proper essence of emotion, the gentle bow, the almost tender voice that delivered a terse report without euphemisms, the pause so that the news could fill the space, that gentle bow again. So that, even though she would have preferred to hurl herself out of the window to escape the soul-searing, -tearing, -bursting monstrous awfulness that invaded her body, even though she might have torn out her hair to ease the pressure on her head, she could not. That gentle nod. And here was Koray, a rock, with both arms around her in case she did not wish to think, move, or plan. The shadows floated like frisky crimson phantoms around her vision. But after the messenger finished with his soft words, and expressed tender sorrow for her pain, Ayaana dragged herself away from Koray. She murmured, “Thank you. But my father is the ocean. Therefore, he does not drown. He is a wave. He is also the tide. He will return.”

  * * *

  Every day, Munira and Ayaana spoke. First they listened to each other’s silences.

  Ayaana asked, “Has he returned?”

  “Not yet, lulu.”

  Silence.

  Munira said, “We have petitioned the sea and its deities for mercy.”

  * * *

  —

  One Friday evening, Ayaana told Koray, who was standing next to her, “I will speak with the water.” Koray was talking to her. She did not hear him, beyond random words: “emotional paralysis…delusional…irrational…” She observed his mouth move: “accept…fate…submit to life…” Ayaana felt herself float away, as light as fluff, leave the room, take the elevator and stairs, walk out the main door, dull pain in her stomach, hollow in the heart, sting in the abdomen, fog in the head. But the more she walked, the more she felt the sea come close to her, and if the sea was close to her, so was Muhidin.

  Zar. A murmuring cry made by djinns at night.

  She could not unhear it. Under the water of her half-world, she looked for Muhidin’s face. “Where are you?” he breathed. 哀愁: ai chou. Sorrow. Palettes of life’s shadows. Topologies: painful, heartbroken, bitter; sorrow, wounded, separated; anguish. When Munira called the next night, and Ayaana heard her, Ayaana moaned until those near to her had to wrench the phone from her hand. Roaming realms without a map. Here she could not wail in her mother’s language. The waiting had metastasized in her marrow, her fiber, and her pores, and then there were those other whispers from the sea that she heard, and she concealed these from her watchers in the blandness of a smile, the diligence of her work.

  * * *

  —

  She was being crowded in by the well-meaning, overseen by Koray who wore his role as “curator” of her life as a dark, heavy, rich coat. Ayaana loathed words. They did not produce Muhidin. They pretended that they could explain the feeling of the not-being-there of her father.

  * * *

  —

  Muhidin.

  Sometimes Ayaana just said his name.

  Yesterday the djinns sang to her. They told her that she ought to be used to disappearances by now. She told them that absences are capricious. They attach themselves to different people in different ways.

  Ayaana had stopped eating.

  Ayaana was dehydrated.

  So they sent a doctor, a roly-poly, bespectacled man who spoke to Ayaana in soft Mandarin and broken English and laughed at his own obscure jokes. He thought she wanted to drown herself.

  “No, no,” Ayaana protested. “I just need to speak with the water.”

  The doctor left. Later, a nurse came to Ayaana’s room with a hydrating IV line. To show that she was in her right senses, Ayaana let the woman insert it into her wrist. They had mixed it up with a drug that would put her to sleep. Ayaana woke up thirty-two hours later, light-headed. And the world had tilted some more, and she was no longer attached to the IV, and the grief had gone deeper, so it was a low hum, as if it were crying in secret.

  * * *

  The Embassy of Kenya sent Ayaana her new passport by registered mail. She took it as a sign that Muhidin would come home soon.

  [ 84 ]

  A medium-sized package came for Ayaana. She studied it. The return address in Mandarin, a place she had not heard of: 破釜, 嵊泗列島, 杭州灣, 舟山群島新區; Po Fu, Shengsi Island, Hangzhou Bay, Zhoushan Archipelago. She opened the package with care. A black-lacquer-painted vase in the shape of a large teardrop—with broken red, green, and amber sea glass embedded in it. The images, whirls, and whorls had created a three-dimensional landscape, feathery gestures burned in so that a fire-drawn, almost blue mythical creature raced through a dark lacquer night, which seemed to move depending on how the light fell on it. It emitted a vague scent of night-blooming jasmine, as if this essence had been interlaced with its clay. The vase filled Ayaana’s hands with its smooth roundedness.

  Koray visited Ayaana’s room at noon and found her contemplating the vase in her hands. “This is different,” he said.

  Ayaana lifted the vase up to her face.

  He asked, “What is it?”

  She shrugged.

  “Something to do with that ‘Descendant’ thing?” asked Koray. “Let me see? Who sent it to you?”

  He grabbed the vase from Ayaana and lifted it to the light. Those who knew what to look for would have recognized the work of a reclusive contemporary ceramicist whose work had appeared as if from nowhere, who was known as 破釜, Po Fu, a play on the words “broken vessel,” which, in interviews the potter had given with his face in shadow, he had said referred to himself and the world.

  Ayaana rose to take it back from Koray.

  She tilted it upward.

  “It is beautiful,” she said.

  Koray pursed his lips. “You did not tell me you liked pottery. We have a large collection in storage back at home.”

  Ayaana turned to Koray. She wanted to tell him that the vague aroma of night jasmine embedded in an etched vase received at dusk in a season of sorrow meant something.

  He watched her as she cradled the vase. His gaze returned to the vase, then back to her. Ayaana’s fingers stroked the vase, a caress, before she took it to her shelf.

  Koray left her room in silence.

  * * *

  —

  Footfalls in a thick, lightless night, as if sea djinns had left the water to seek her out and, if they could not reach her by song, they did so by means of dreams in which they chanted, until grief drenched her face with tears that she wiped when she woke.

  * * *

  —

  News from Pate Island:

  Muhidin had not yet returned.

  * * *

  —

  Rain: thunder at midnight. Ayaana slipped out of class at 10:00 a.m. and went down an em
ergency staircase to find the gate to Baicheng Beach and access to a sea from which she had been temporarily barred—for her own safety, the counselor had said. She squeezed through a fence and dashed down a side road and along a rotting jetty that stopped at a rocky shore. She slid on seaweed, and picked herself up to jump from rock to rock until the sea spray could soak her body and hair and fill her. And then she looked past the gray, gray water, the breaking surf, and saw a large dead feathered bird ebbing with the currents of that time of day. Above her head, circling gulls. She tilted her head to follow their dance, their whirl and return and swoop. She lifted up her arms, stretched them over the water. She waited for a tingle at the tip of her fingers, something to indicate that Muhidin had heard her heart screaming out to him.

  Nothing.

  Nothing.

  Ayaana returned to the campus dripping water, trailing beach soil, shivering, and silent.

  * * *

  In her room, Ayaana phoned her mother. Munira answered, “No,” to her unasked question.

  Ayaana said, “I heard the djinns last night.”

  Munira’s abrupt “Don’t answer them.”

  * * *

  —

  A second package came to Ayaana by mail. It contained a white lacquer vase with sky-blue flecks that seemed to extend not only its contours but also its dimensions. It had a rough finish that scintillated the nerves on the skin, so that Ayaana returned to it often, to rub her palms and the backs of her hands on it. She lifted it to press her face into it. This one smelled of the deep, dark earth.

  [ 85 ]

  The door to Ayaana’s room swung on its hinges, moved by a breeze that traveled down the corridor, having swooped in through large open windows. There were no thieves. The consequences of crime on campus stopped a mere half-millimeter from the penalty of death by firing squad. Expulsion was the kindest sentence. So Ayaana was unworried when she walked into her open room that evening. The wind blew in through her open window. Had she forgotten to lock her door?

  * * *

  —

  Pieces.

  Both her gift vases.

  The shards were in a blended heap on the floor.

  She knew the wind had not gathered the broken portions into one pile. It was this, seeing the pieces, that made her rage. The tears trapped between her heart and soul seemed to bleed through her ragged breathing. Delirium. Madness. Never! She screamed from her core as she emptied her olive canvas rucksack, upended its contents, and gathered the shattered pieces and poured them in. She bruised her hands as she rummaged in the wastebasket in her closet for the address on their original packaging. She wrote it out, and she was burning. She retrieved that packaging and transferred the broken pieces into it. Securing it. In her eyes a dangerous smoldering, and, single-minded, she set out before dawn.

  * * *

  Ayaana secured her rucksack as she strode. Inside the bag were her purse, a notepad containing an address, some water, the broken pieces of vases, underwear, and an extra T-shirt. She traveled, fueled by rage. Never! And as she stood at a platform of the Xiamen North railway station waiting for a bullet train, she had no plan other than to find a potter.

  Kusi huleta mvua.

  The south monsoon brings the rain.

  [ 86 ]

  In a northeastern trajectory, Ayaana’s train hurled itself across immense landscapes, whizzing past city after city, which mirrored those she had seen before. View from a window. In the foreground, concrete uniformity oppressing even the sky, box after box after box, fence after fence, and in between, smog and fog. In the background, a blur of stillnesses, as if, in reality, nothing moved, nothing changed. Ayaana sat in a large red chair inside a fast-moving rectangle, sealed from the terrain. Except that now she had time to reach for Muhidin, hands flat against a sealed train window, the fleeing, shrieking train, and she in it, clutching a bag that contained pieces of broken clay. Glimpse of ocean in portions; as if it too had been taken and smashed into manageable pieces.

  Brown cliffs, gray mountain peaks. Beneath these, another city, another bridge, another district, written out in flat-screen lights that touted all the commodities of human existence. Her fellow passengers slurped their food while reading books on their phones, or had closed themselves off from everything with earphones. The voice that addressed them was the one that announced stops and starts and warned them not to step off a moving train. Through the window she found the flight of wild geese. She pursued them with her gaze. They prevented her from noticing the eruption of new stone cities.

  Destination Zhejiang. Subway, then bus. Traversing seas and rivers on vast bridges, icons of human madness and genius; the willful shrinking of the world, the evidence of a culture’s spiderlike focus to weave itself deep into spaces, places, and already frayed worlds. Eight hours after leaving Xiamen she entered Hangzhou, Zhejiang, which was, though she had not thought of it when she set out, within sight of the ineffable and mercurial Qiantang River, lair of the Silver Dragon, the best of those solitary waves that carried tides upstream. Tidal bore, she remembered from her lessons, as she walked across roads, oblivious to stares, heading for the bridge, trying to think beyond her churning anger. As she looked at the octagonal Six Harmonies Pagoda emerging from the greenery of the Yuelun Mountain across the bridge, she finally gave way to a few quiet tears. Holding on to the day’s light warmed her and melted the wintriness of her losses. Crying over broken vases? She almost laughed at herself. She breathed in deep. Muhidin. She allowed the sensation, but the bite from his absence was far less searing than it had been in Xiamen. As she shifted her rucksack from one shoulder to the other, the broken pieces of the vases jingling within, her stride was long. She hurried to find and take a bus to Xinchang County, and meet the ferry to Shengsi Island, and from there figure out which of the nearly four hundred islands hosted a potter who had sent her the gift vases.

  * * *

  Ayaana trod a sand slope dotted with browning seashells, delicate things that crumbled under her footsteps. She trod softly. Her rucksack on her back, she followed an ox track that abutted fields of green wheat. Shimmering in the distance to her left, a fog-shrouded bay. A chill wind circled her as she stopped so that the scents of the sea might suffuse her being, soak into her.

  * * *

  —

  She paused to catch her breath. She surveyed the greenery; holding her face up, she felt for the direction of the wind. She ran down a small hill. Breathing. Breathing. Down, down, down, until she reached the thick pearl-gray sands, into which footsteps and seaweed pieces were implanted. The sands stopped in front of a makeshift jetty that stretched out, a grim, cobbled road to a confluence of rocks upon which a lighthouse stood stranded, like a forgotten, fading legend. Even the wild sea it had once guarded seemed to have receded far from it, after an earthquake. This was Ayaana’s destination. Rehearsing a speech she must make to a stranger: These are broken. Please fix them. I can wait.

  * * *

  —

  Evening. Far-breaking waves split on the black pebble beach. Small boats in the distant sparkle of water. Inside the roughly repaired lighthouse, a wooden floor, shells of abalone on smooth shelves. High, fractured windows opened out to the horizon and cast shadows on the cliff edge.

  Ayaana’s first steps across the threshold.

  A potter’s wheel and a long table; he was sitting on a curved bench in the middle. He smelled her rose fragrance before he saw her standing at his doorway, hair over her forehead, intensity in dark eyes deepened by experience, made beautiful and fevered. He kept to his seat, struggling not to react. Slow steps toward him. She looked again, squinting. She was startled, and then not startled that it was he. The potter. Perhaps she had known.

  * * *

  —

  He was in partial silhouette, his gaze level. The dusk light framed her features, her mouth parted. The last time he had seen her was when he had
traveled to be in her presence in the night gardens of Xiamen. He had told himself that he had come to bring her news of Delaksha. But, as then, now he said nothing. She dropped her bag. Footsteps across the floor. Shivering now. “I…” she began.

  She sought and found the burn scars on his face. The familiar eyes now deeper set, as if he had recently suffered. He was thinner. He wore his hair longer. Hollowed features. His hands were colored by gray clay. She stepped close.

  He returned to his work in slow motion.

  “Ni shenti haihaoba”—You are well? His words were soft on his tongue.

  “Haihao”—Fine—she stammered.

  He squashed clay. She watched him in his earth-stained apron that might or might not have once been brown. White-painted walls. She tilted her head at the two Zao Wou-Ki prints and heard the faraway water. From sea to soil, she thought as he wove the clay and, outside, waves slithered on rocks. She turned on her toes, picking up scents: abalone, sea slugs, and cucumbers; dung of seagulls, the sweat of the sea. She huddled in her jacket, stomach churning. What words: “These. They broke.” She added, “I didn’t break them.”

  When she found herself on her knees, grieving, she scrambled in panic. What now? Noiseless tears puddled the ground. The fractures, the fences, these fragments.

  Lai Jin listened. He threw clay, wove worlds and comfort with molding-making hands. She was here. She shouldn’t be, but she was. The rose whiff was now in his nostrils, the promise of new life, like citrus. His old lighthouse was suffused with the scent of light and wild roses as a sea wind howled. Outside, the stumps of a forest of petrified wood, calcified by sea salt and time’s crouch. Tuning in to the rhythm of the turning wheel. Ni shi shei? whispered the waters, Who are you? they demanded.