The Dragonfly Sea

by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

  * * *

  —

  One early evening, Munira decided to seek out Mehdi. He got up to greet her. Without her saying anything, he said, “Time corrects. She misses her father. I miss her father and my brother.” He rubbed his eyes before adding, “Bi Badaawi, liwapokuwa, lakuwa”—What will be will be.

  * * *

  —

  Abeerah now dared to shadow Ayaana, whose aloofness had only made her think her big sister even more magical. Ayaana would sometimes turn and find a little face with big eyes staring at her from behind a cupboard or bucket or chair, with something akin to worship. When she wandered outside, she often turned in time to glimpse a small being darting from bush to bush behind her. She crushed her laughter. She pursed her lips. She needed to ignore the child.

  [ 98 ]

  Six weeks later, an increasingly emboldened Abeerah trailed Ayaana to the mangroves, where Ayaana had taken a detour to watch approaching boats before returning to Mehdi’s workshop. Back at work, Ayaana was drawing rough blueprints for a cell-phone app that fishing boats might use to send out intermittent coordinates to others on the shore. She was wondering what it might take to activate the system so that the data would update themselves when she heard a bloodcurdling “Ayaaaaaana!”

  Ayaana rose to meet her mother, who came flying down the pathway. “Abeerah!” Munira seized Ayaana’s shoulders, looking around. “Abeerah! Where is she? Isn’t she with you?”

  “Nooo,” Ayaana huffed. That interloper was so annoying.

  “I’ve looked and looked everywhere.” Munira was sobbing, “Where is she? She was following you. Didn’t you see her?”

  Ayaana’s heart tumbled; her body juddered. “Let’s look.”

  They ran up and down the island, shouting Abeerah’s name. Some of the Pate Town dwellers joined the search. Every call, every “Abeerah!” was a blow on Ayaana’s body. She had not seen Abeerah. She had taught herself to be blind to the child. Ayaana screamed, “Abeeerah!” Fighting self-loathing. What have I done? “Abeeraaaaah!” she cried, offering new and forever promises: Come back. I will love you. Forgive me. I will love you.

  * * *

  —

  Abeerah had slipped and fallen down a slope into a mangrove grove not too far from where Ayaana had been sitting in the morning. A sluggish current had sent her drifting about twenty meters away from where she could be seen. She was stuck in sea mud by thick mangrove roots. Ayaana, who had been circling the island and had returned to the mangroves, heard, between the anxious cawing of crows, the faintest of sounds. Her name: “Ayayana!” She hurtled in the direction of the call, urged on by a feeling, and saw the tracks in the mire. She jumped into the brackish water. With the tide coming in, it was up to her thighs. She saw mangrove branches upon which dangled the gossamer wings of a thousand dragonflies. Clinging to a stump was her mud-stained sister.

  * * *

  —

  It was twilight.

  Mud-marked, Ayaana carried her sister all the way to their house. Her sister clung to her, not moving. Those who saw them assumed the worst, because Ayaana was mute. Those who saw them turned away, lamenting the losses that afflicted the family—too much, they cried. Munira, visible in her fuchsia sweater, was told that her daughter had been found. She was asked to prepare her heart. Munira heard the silence. Then she heard Ayaana’s howl, a horrible sound as if something infinite and good and beloved were gone forever. Munira fell to her knees. She refused the hands reaching down to help her. She crawled all the way to her house, her knees scraped, her sorrow dumb.

  * * *

  —

  Ayaana rocked Abeerah in her arms. When Ayaana had seized Abeerah, she had had to let go of Muhidin, and to do so she had touched the bottom of fathomless grief. It was for her father that she cried out—the one who had never shown up, and the one she had chosen. She cried for Muhidin.

  Then.

  A heart whisper, feather-light in the soul: Promised you I wouldn’t leave you. See, you have found me again. Stillness. I shall love you. Even Abeerah heard those words.

  “Baba?” she whispered.

  “Yes, my love,” Ayaana whispered back.

  * * *

  —

  Munira dragged herself in. Then it dawned on her that both her children were whole. Pate Town heard a woman’s terrible laugh, the laugh of wild, fierce, ceaseless life.

  * * *

  The next day, Ayaana, veiled and red-eyed, tore out of the house before dawn. She accosted the stooped Abasi, eternal muezzin. She had to talk to someone. “I have hated a child,” she told him, her voice cracked. Abasi, toothless and cataract-eyed, would listen to her. She would speak from dawn to noon. She would weep. She would tell him about Koray. Everything. Abasi would cry with her. Then he would wipe Ayaana’s eyes with dry, scaly hands. He had become a human being. “So,” Abasi would comfort Ayaana, “you have been offered the gift of falling and failing; you encountered the mystery of human wretchedness and powerlessness.” And then his eyes would shine. “Use it wisely.” And Ayaana would stare at him, speechless. Afterward, Ayaana would retrieve her secret trove of words—“yearning,” “searching,” “longing,” “desire”—a topography of living.

  * * *

  At evenfall, Ayaana was eating damask roses, stuffing small pink petals into her mouth. She chewed rose hip, knowing that the thorniness that scraped her tongue was the rub of life. Sucking rose water from her fingers. On the stove, green neem-leaf water bubbled. It would treat forty ailments. Ayaana dipped her fingers into the liquid. She tasted its bitterness, a basic taste in existence. It filled up her tongue. It blended with the rose flavors that were already there. She offered a petal to her sister, and watched Abeerah’s face as its essence suffused her.

  * * *

  —

  A day later, at low tide, within the mangroves, the two sisters watched home-comers arrive on boats. They made up stories about them. And then Abeerah asked Ayaana, “Our father—he is on that boat?”

  Ayaana froze, and time fell away. For a moment she was that child again. She answered, “His ship is the biggest. The sea he crosses covers the sky. But first he must harness two stars for you and me. Only then will he return.”

  Abeerah digested this.

  Another question: “You are my Ayaana?”

  Tears and a smile. Ayaana’s arms clung to the child’s shoulders. Her voice caught as she answered, “For always, forever.”

  * * *

  —

  Sometime later, when the tide was higher and the sea warm, the sisters swam together without caring who saw them. One day Ayaana would introduce Abeerah to Bollywood. Tonight, though, they were content to examine the stars to try to identify the sky-sea where their beloved father sailed.

  Simba kiwa maindoni, hafunuwi zakawe ndole.

  A lion sheathes its claws when hunting.

  [ 99 ]

  Eons ago—for what does time matter now?—three strangers had leapt from beneath the waves and seized Ziriyab Raamis. Three beings in black had torn him away from his home and his Buthayna, his Ghazalah, his soaring Huma. They had twisted his limbs, tied him up, covered his head with a black cloth, and thrown him on a boat to Diego Garcia. He had embarked on a long and hideous voyage. When they finally uncovered his face, weeks later, he found himself huddled, cramped, and naked in a cold-shower cell in a nameless, faceless bay, in a concentration camp in alienated territory.

  He was dragged out of the shower by more snarling men. An orange jumpsuit waited for him, his costume for the timeless years. Men mocked his diarrhea, his hacking cough. Men bled him, and replaced his name with a number. They forced tubes down his throat to feed him until he gagged and still hoped to die. But when he would have faded away completely, he invoked his Buthayna, his Ghazalah, his soaring Huma. He would close his eyes. The whisper would emerge from inside shadows. It was a lone b
lue note, a settling sound, like his wife’s perfect heartbeat. So that, when he could open his eyes again, he might return to life. One night, when he was about to die, he had bled from his soul. But then his father, Muhidin, appeared. They held each other. They spoke. When he woke up, his heart was quiet, and he could hear the sound of seabirds and imagine the brush of wings against his face. It was the first time he had smiled in that place.

  * * *

  —

  Two words into which he had retreated in his season of darkness: kabsh alfida, كبش الفداء—sacrificial lamb. The scapegoat. For, in the same senseless manner as his incarceration, he was released. He was escorted to a waiting cargo plane that dropped him off in Al-‘Ain, Abu Dhabi. No explanations.

  “You are going to kill me.” He spoke with a rasp, declaring the obvious, and his voice was colored with hollowed-out age and defeated rage. A still point amid the flow. He had not yet recognized the flow as people.

  “You are free to go.”

  He swerved as if turning from a blow, and waited for the lie to come to birth—the death they had prepared for him, so he grieved his life.

  A tear dropped between the men.

  “Our investigations are complete. You are now free to go.”

  “…”

  “You are free to go.”

  He gasped and ogled his handler’s bulk, the thick, unkempt ginger beard, mirrored dark glasses. Ziriyab dared a glance so he might start to believe. He saw twin images looking back at him. He did not know the man in those reflections.

  “Free to go.”

  The man gave him a label-free black rucksack. “Everything you need is in there.” A bland voice.

  Inside the bag, Ziriyab would later find a brand-new Yemeni passport, a wad of cash in two currencies, which he did not count, jeans, cheap sneakers and a shirt, and a shiny new suit. A pat on his head, a tap on his right shoulder, the wickedly accented “Salaam aleikum.”

  * * *

  —

  Ziriyab Raamis stood frozen. Concentrating on the prickling sensation that filled even his heart with pins and needles. When he opened his eyes, what he saw made him stumble, and if he had not still been voiceless, he might have shrieked. What he saw was people moving, crossing streets, planes taking off from the airport bustle of another life, and he was standing unchained. He turned and saw an elderly woman in a bright-blue hijab, and her face was lined with bright-eyed worry.

  “Jaddah-ti?” he murmured.

  My grandmother.

  She had heard him. “Nem, aliabn?” Sweet voiced, warm, a mother’s gaze.

  Son.

  In him, a choking sob; he bit it down. “Shukraan,” he grunted.

  She was real, and he saw toothless joy in the wreathed face of an exquisite old woman whose voice was honeyed and curious. “Min ayn anta?”—Where are you from?

  Haawiyah, he might have said. But then he would have also had to burden another soul with the details of the topography of hell. So, instead, he leaned forward to ask her, “Ayn ‘ana?”—Where am I?

  Grandmother giggled, wagging a finger at him. “Naughty boy, teasing your own mother.” She trotted off, still chuckling, and her laughter bounced around in Ziriyab’s head and landed at the top of his heart, where it waited for him to respond.

  Ziriyab started to move. One limp into another, and his body tilted left. Left was the side he had favored when he slept in his steel bed. Ziriyab walked into the realm of free-to-go-ness, waiting for the bullet. He clutched the rucksack to his front to shield his heart. Only after he had walked for an hour did he dare to look at the signs. They informed him that he really was in the garden city of Al-‘Ain.

  * * *

  —

  Ziriyab walked. He carried what he knew: the nature of lies, ugliness, and hatred; how to invert good and evil; the vulnerability of humans before the roar of power, how only a few could resist the temptation to roll the dice of life or death over another; living under the daily threat of a terrible dying. He walked with fresh memories of sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, food deprivation, water deprivation. He understood that uncertainty was a weapon of mass fear. He carried trace marks of blindfolds worn for days. The invisible disfigurement caused by human bullying. As he walked, he tumbled back into an abyss of harsh lights, loud random noises, and the ghastly musical brayings of alleged artists.

  To survive, he had discarded time. To survive, he had shed his need to know the time of day or night. He had hidden inside memory. There he had, one day while in solitary confinement, heard his class teacher’s voice remind him and his literature classmates that “an actor’s role is to reflect humanity.” There and then, he sought a role for himself. He took on kabsh alfida as his sobriquet.

  The Scapegoat, performed by Ziriyab Raamis.

  Then he had laughed at himself. Yet, through the role, he had learned to pity his tormentors and to read the gradual emptying of souls from eyes. His gaze washed over the faces of men who strapped him down to feed or beat or half drown him. One night, they threatened to pluck out his eyes, so he shut them. They had forgotten that even the senses have eyes of their own. He could watch them through the eyes of his nose, ears, skin, and heart, these other prisoners of war.

  Yet there had been seasons when the ocean of horror inside had engulfed him, and he was ready to die. But he would have died wrong, because accompanying the anguish was the undercurrent of a malicious thrill that these men, when they returned home, would deliver into the womb of their own families the malignant gift that now possessed them.

  * * *

  —

  As Ziriyab walked, he remembered that he had managed to hide his heart. He had distributed its portions evenly. One portion he kept in silence; another he had left beneath the breasts of his Buthayna, his Ghazalah, his own soaring Huma; a third he hid among ghosts of the family he had lost to drones; and the fourth part he had tossed to the God who had forsaken him.

  * * *

  —

  Ziriyab traveled across Abu Dhabi.

  A voice in his head murmured in poetic meter to orient him. He heard:

  At the end of the river,

  The wolf star plows into the sheep flock of Algenib

  The phoenix dances

  Into the navel of the mare

  The shining one bristles

  At the follower of al-Dabarān…

  It was night in the desert, as scorching there as it had been during the day. Ziriyab relished the heat and the thick air, which he needed to gulp down in order to breathe. The sweat that poured out of his soul purged him as he traversed the fissured land. He was in Musandam, in Oman, on his way to Khasab and its port. He crossed Bukha, stopping for sweetmeats and spiced rice. He was unable to endure meat. It brought back to him the memory of the slow putrefaction of bodies at that prison camp. The stars at night: how he had ached for them, how he had longed for them. So he stopped. He fell to the ground to gaze at the heavens. And then he could not see for the tears in his eyes and the howling of the ghosts in his soul.

  * * *

  —

  He had given himself no choice but to return to his wife by way of the sea. He was wary of confined spaces. He wanted neither to see nor to meet a Caucasian any day soon. He would never board a plane again. He found a ship, a jahazi. It was under the captainship of one Nahodha Aboud Khamis, born in Mombasa in 1964. They took to the blue sea on the tail end of the kaskazi. Ziriyab tuned in to the winds of his ocean. Inside their song, he listened to his wife whispering him back home.

  Hakuna bahari, isiyo na mawimbi.

  There is no sea without waves.

  [ 100 ]

  Nine months earlier, in the January time of departing dragonflies, a corpselike man had appeared like an apparition on the island on which he had been born, from which he had been exiled, to which he had
returned for refuge, and from which he had been stolen. Now, on the decayed cusp of a late Thursday in October 2016, this man wearing Munira’s fuchsia cardigan splashes through a freshwater pool teeming with minuscule C-shaped dragonfly nymphs. The waves swirled warm around his legs. He inhaled and shut his eyes. He closed his eyes, the better to hear the bass-infused chord of longing that had brought him home. At Pate, he had cried to his unseen father, his betrayer: Why?

  He had been at this for months now.

  Home.

  But his heart had not found shelter yet, had not yet understood that it needed a new language to contain his life. Everything had changed. Nothing had changed. Flash of blue. Kerem-kerem. A bee-eater. His eyes locked on the rhythm of its wings. Its beauty pulled his memory back from echoing the gross blaring of a nation’s anthem. His gaze sought the bird again. Nothing had changed. Everything had changed, and he shuddered because in the sound of the wind he also heard the horror he had hoped to outrun slithering in their direction.

  Everything had changed. He now had a daughter.

  A sister, he corrected himself.

  Abeerah had already informed him that Ayaana was her sister, not his.

  Newer wounds from an unremitting darker struggle with volatile emotions, with disillusionment: his father’s child, his wife’s daughter.

  Ziriyab unclenched his fists.

  He had died.

  Death had filled up the emptied spaces of life with other beings.

  Life, it seemed, had not missed him.