The Dragonfly Sea

by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

  He could read the story of his death in the glances of those who had experienced his absence, in the habits of his Buthayna, his Ghazalah, his soaring Huma, who still averted the guilt-shame-defiance look of one who had betrayed faith.

  She had not waited for him. She had not proved to death that love was infallible.

  “Forgive me,” she had told him. Those were her first words to him when she saw him, and he her.

  Munira had said, “When you disappeared, we died.”

  Munira then added, “Now you have returned, you can see we are no longer the same.”

  She had repeated, “Forgive me.”

  * * *

  —

  After the silence, which lasted two days, Ziriyab had spoken. He told Munira that it was the memory of her existence that had kept him from being devoured.

  Then he had a question for her: “Why him?”

  She was silent. Then she said, “He loves what he knows.”

  He grabbed her forearm. “And I don’t?”

  She shook her head. “You love what you do not know.”

  He had cried, “Is that so wrong?”

  “No,” she whispered. “But I am both.”

  * * *

  Hudhaifa waved at Ziriyab from the seashore while hurrying on, making it clear he did not want to speak. Ziriyab watched. The islanders were suspicious of his materiality. Most did not wish to be alone with him, half expecting to see him transform into a djinn. A tiny smile—he was not entirely sure he would not.

  * * *

  Ayaana observed Ziriyab when she could. She hesitated with her questions because of the otherness of his face, as if it was Ziriyab, but not entirely. He had taken to observing the behavior of land birds. The ravens, the doves. The pigeons he thought he might keep. One day, she walked out to the veranda, where he was squatting and looking out at the world. “It was a bad place?” she asked.

  He nodded once. Could not speak yet of many things. It is a wound that never heals. It infuses you with the enduring stench of human evil.

  Unchecked tears.

  They both watched the world in silence.

  Minutes later, Ziriyab would tell Ayaana, “A young man from Yemen—he has not eaten for eight years. They have to force food into him every day.” Ziriyab’s voice receded. “He was only a child when they stole him from his mother.” And when he looked at Ayaana, his eyes were crushed inside a sunken face. His voice was inflected with rust. “They bleed souls—that is their hunger. They are possessed, you understand. When they kill us, they do not think we are real.”

  A warm wind stirred the land. Distant waves bumped into the shoreline. Bahari haishi zingo—The sea does not stop moving.

  Ayaana hugged herself. She said, “We looked a long, long time for you.” From the outside, wind sounds in the mangroves, and the songs of the island’s new children at play.

  Stillness.

  Ziriyab listened. Then he said, “Now I’ll go to the sea.”

  * * *

  —

  Munira was on her way into the house, carrying a bucket full of dried clothes. As she crossed the threshold, she glanced away.

  Ziriyab put out his hand. “Come with me?” he asked.

  “Soon,” Munira murmured, her eyes focused elsewhere.

  The hot wind swarmed Ziriyab’s body as he stepped out into the pale yellow evening. Without a word, Munira and Ayaana watched him glide toward the sea.

  [ 101 ]

  The howl of djinns before dawn, a harrowing din. When Ayaana heard the wildness, the anguish of it, she wrapped her body and raced to the ocean to see what creature this might be. She ran to the end of the pathway. She crossed the threshold between the red land and black sand, and she saw—buffeted by waves, arms flailing at sky and water, beating his heart with an open palm—Ziriyab Raamis.

  [ 102 ]

  Ziriyab returned to his first room in Muhidin’s house in the night. When my father, my betrayer, returns, he will find me here. But when the doors closed, he paused to imagine Munira’s knocking on the door. Against this door, he often cried unseen. Not sleeping. Counting minutes until the dawn, when he had permission to walk through half-labyrinths into Munira’s house for the day and glimpse his Buthayna, his Ghazalah, and still, his own soaring Huma.

  * * *

  —

  They often poked at each other’s tender scars, probing new boundaries.

  Munira asked him one day, during breakfast, “Will he return as you have?”

  Watching her, Ziriyab replied, “The thought haunts me every day.” Clash of cutlery on utensils. Spoon to plate, spoon stirring sugar into a ceramic mug. “How will you choose?” he asked.

  Munira turned to watch her late-life daughter attempt to eat. Her silence splintered Ziriyab’s heart again. Munira pointed: “Abeerah.”

  Ziriyab’s spoon slipped from his hand and clattered to the floor. He bent over to reach for it. “A daughter.” His voice was faint.

  “His daughter.” She looked him in the eye. “Your sister.”

  They ate in silence after that.

  * * *

  —

  One early morning, after breakfast, Ziriyab decided to visit Mehdi’s workplace. On the way, he was distracted by the sight of a little being dressed in yellow slinking toward the mangroves. Out of concern, he followed it.

  There, just behind the dunes, beneath a grand old mango tree, a parliament of crows greeted her, fluttering like doves as she approached. Ziriyab watched as Abeerah scattered the food she had taken from her mother’s table that morning. He heard her admonish a brown bird with an orange beak that had dived in to steal portions from her hands. Ziriyab knew that the current county administrator had, on Jamhuri Day, launched yet another futile war against crows. Abeerah was obviously with the rebellion. As Ziriyab watched her, a tender, warm, molten honey eased through his heart, and, from within, a chortle. At first, the unfamiliarity of his own laugh unnerved him, and he slapped a hand over his mouth.

  Abeerah froze when she turned toward the sound and saw Ziriyab. She tensed, eyes large in fear. She considered tears; this always deferred punishments. She waited for Ziriyab to scold, but then he planted a finger on his mouth, as he exaggerated sneaking away. How she laughed.

  The next morning, when Abeerah’s and Ziriyab’s eyes met across Munira’s breakfast table, Ziriyab slid a mahamri portion into his pocket. They would feed the birds together from now on. The birds deigned to approach him for food. Their simple trust. Heads twisted at him in curiosity: he was of special interest to the ravens. He discovered he was smiling, and the child was beaming at him. Stillness, the tides, the child, and the birds. A raven with a deformed foot hopped toward him and pecked at the edges of his kikoi for bread fragments. Only then did Ziriyab allow his heart to contemplate the matter of Abeerah, his most unexpected sister. She was staring at him, her head tilted far back, and within her eyes, the totality of mischief, an invitation to play again.

  * * *

  Still, at dusk every day, Ziriyab went to the sea, as if to purge his life of its human-inflicted bruises. He was shrouded in those threads from Munira’s life that he wore as a talisman—today it was her fuchsia cardigan. He did not yet know how best to re-enter life outside the shelter of home and family. He had ceased wondering about the rest of the world and its silences about demons that roamed the earth unimpeded and unquestioned. So he went to the sea to ask why he lived when better, braver, bolder, more beautiful men had been murdered. What would it be like to see the world whole again, and not through the seared-in vision of barbed wire and prison bars? He scratched his skin. Where are you? he asked the phantoms as he scanned the waters for the shapes of the men who had died. Then there were the day memories of nightmares. Terrors that hid from light would cause him to rise like a bird on fire at least three times in the night, crying out like a cat being sa
crificed alive. At least three times a week, before the night terrors, his spirit tried to escape his body through the top of his head. Ziriyab would yank it back into his body, clinging to its fiery heels and refusing to let go. It was such an effort that when he got up in the morning he would be panting and stinking of sweat.

  * * *

  —

  On an October Thursday of 2016, on a timeworn island that had sprouted off the Western Indian Ocean, a corpselike man, dark eyes flitting, wearing a too-small fuchsia woman’s cardigan, would splash through a freshwater pool teeming with minuscule C-shaped dragonfly nymphs. Twelve meters away, dusk’s incoming spring tide—his destination. There the sea would swirl and froth warm around his thin, scarred ankles as he inhaled the salt-seaweed-earth smell of the season. He would close his eyes, waiting for a whisper from inside shadows. He would hear, as always, a lone blue note, that settling sound like the perfect heartbeat: a bass-infused chord of longing, the song of home. After forty minutes of pure listening, he would turn to wade back to land. But, close to the shore, something would wink and glint at him from the shallows. He would wander over to look and find it was red sea glass that had been worn by the weight of the sea into a smooth, shiny pebble. A portent.

  [ 103 ]

  Stranger signs have been summoned from out of the sea by those who crave an answer. A fisherman, not one of the best, had hauled in an exceptionally bountiful catch. Among his miscellaneous sea bounty, shivering, shuddering octopuses, mkunga, tengesi, kilualua, pono, and suli suli was a blood-rusted frayed rope. In that frayed rope was a red glint. And the red glint was a ruby ring that had last been seen on Muhidin’s right ring finger. And the fisherman understood that the sea might have been speaking. He only wished it had not selected him to deliver the message. As with such situations, as soon as the man docked his vessel, he did not bother with unloading his sea harvest, but bore the ring straight to the sheikh, who he felt was better placed to interpret the meaning of this happening for the family concerned.

  [ 104 ]

  Munira was in her garden, clearing the weeds as she listened to the crickets and their plaintive mating songs. The evening threatened to turn everything into a silhouette.

  “We must talk,” Ziriyab whispered to her.

  She turned to study, again, the shape of hauntedness in his gaze. Her heart twisted.

  He asked, “Where are the children?”

  Munira stuttered.

  Tears on Ziriyab’s face. “He will not return.” She was wiping the mud off her hands. “You may want to speak to Ayaana.” Munira’s body shook. She rubbed her eyes, but still they smarted with sour tears. “Here,” Ziriyab said, and he placed a ruby ring on her open palm.

  * * *

  It was Munira’s dreadful keening that suggested to the rest of the island that there was no further need to wait for Muhidin. After the sound, the vision of Ayaana tearing away, a silent and furious, unstoppable tempest. Islanders hurried toward Munira’s house.

  * * *

  —

  Mwalimu Juma intoned three times, “Whoever dies by drowning is a martyr.”

  * * *

  —

  Pate heard from the elderly Abasi how meaningful the return of the ring was, but his words were garbled and bound by an undercurrent of uncertainty: The return of Ziriyab and now Muhidin’s ring did not necessarily mean death. These signs could also mean “lost,” “misplaced.”

  * * *

  —

  The island reshaped its body to accommodate the hint of calamity. It sorrowed with the family, but not too intensely, lest they all curse the hazy possibility of Muhidin’s return.

  * * *

  —

  Munira offered these visitors her rose-essence-scented tea with coconut mahamri and did not know what to think or feel.

  * * *

  —

  Ayaana had huddled close to Fundi Mehdi. She was avoiding the crowds. “There is no body,” she informed Mehdi. “He will return.”

  A Salat al-Janazah for Muhidin took place the next day in the courtyard of the crumbling mosque. Ziriyab stood with the island’s men in front as Pate tried to free itself from the shadow of waiting for Muhidin and Kitwana Kipifit. Pate half mourned Muhidin and the former seeker now entrenched as Kitwana Kipifit. Prayers of repose for the presumed dead, prayers for the bereaved, prayers for protection, ceaseless prayers that were the evidence of the reluctance of the many to let go of Muhidin, seafarer, keeper of secrets, healer of intimate wounds, owner of Books and Other Things, Ayaana’s chosen father, Munira’s husband, Abeerah’s and Ziriyab’s father, man of Pate, Ziriyab’s ghost. Abasi intoned the Basmallah. Stirring winds, temperature drop; the quality of light deepened to a purer orange. Change of season. In Abasi’s intoning, Ayaana also heard echoes of music from another time inside a large house that was a tomb: “Ah! That day of tears and mourning / From the dust of earth returning…”

  Later that evening, quietly, Munira retrieved the ring from her brassiere, to give it to Ziriyab. “It was always yours.”

  “Keep it,” Ziriyab pleaded with her.

  She studied his face, and then nodded.

  * * *

  Muhidin.

  Inna Llilahi wa inna Ilayhi Raajicuun.

  We belong to Allah and to Him we shall return.

  * * *

  —

  Or, perhaps, not yet.

  [ 105 ]

  Two and a half months later, Munira pounded on Ziriyab’s door. It was after his third scream that Tuesday night. First she had called him on his cell phone to say, “You are crying again.”

  A confession: “When I close my eyes, they come, with red eyes…eyes with fangs. I smell their breath.” He gasped. “They are here.”

  Stillness.

  Munira said, “Unlock your door.” She switched off her phone.

  Ziriyab was sure he had heard her wrong. His craving often bewildered his thoughts. He went to the door anyway. He unlocked it.

  Munira was there.

  Eye contact.

  Both looked away.

  Munira walked in.

  Ziriyab shut the door.

  They walked slowly up the stairs, bodies almost touching. Munira preceded him into his bedroom. She stepped out of her slippers. She dropped the leso covering. She unzipped her dress. She lifted up her hair and made a bun.

  * * *

  Ziriyab and Munira, veterans of those battles that unfold in between spaces, both graying and sadder, would peaceably thrive. Munira flew once to Pemba and then returned. The next time, Munira sent Ziriyab ahead of her. When he returned to Pate, he had fattened up and his face now glowed.

  “Bom dia família,” he would announce every morning, while trying to forget that the first Portuguese phrase his mind had retained was dor da alma—pain of the soul. Later, in the refined laughter Ziriyab shared with Munira, as they lobbed phrases in Portuguese, Shangaan, and Makonde at each other, Ayaana sensed, perhaps before they did, that they would leave Pate Island again.

  [ 106 ]

  One night, close to 4:00 a.m., soft footsteps led up to the dunes where Ayaana sat, waiting for the morning, as she struggled to imagine what she could make of her life. Ayaana turned at the sound and saw a woman shrouded in gray and white, her veils aflutter, her eyes hollowed, her mouth frozen in a rictus of horror. Ayaana had leapt up and was preparing to flee, to scream, when the woman, Mama Suleiman, groaned in the voice of a void, “Help me, please.”

  And Ayaana’s body came to a complete halt mid-flight. The woman said, “My eyes…I can no longer see.” But Ayaana could see that her eyes were fine and were looking at her with death. A gleaming object in the woman’s hand: a tablet computer. “Look for me,” Mama Suleiman said. She pointed to the screen. “Is it him?”

  A scene from the wars of the day: pockmarked palaces, rubble on the streets, bloods
tained craters that used to be roads, ceaseless screams frozen on human faces as if the earth itself had become a single groan; trucks burned black, cabbage and tomatoes and eggplants. This had been a market before the detonation. A still-veiled man—wearing a niqab? Ayaana wondered—bullet belt, bloodied camouflage gear, a body caught in the act of retrieving an AK-47 from mounds of flesh, former boy-men and their casualties. Ayaana scrutinized the trade objects, as Koray would have: the price-tagged grenade, bullets, cartridges, guns, rockets, missiles, tanks, and uniforms, the portions of a single blood-and-brain-spattered mosaic showing on a tablet screen. But what Mama Suleiman wanted to know was if the man alive in the foreground could be Suleiman, if Ayaana agreed that the other—a cracked head with the skull exposed and bleeding, popped-out eyes in the background—was not her son.

  Ayaana said, “No, it is not.”

  “I look every day,” Mama Suleiman grunts, her voice relieved and human again. “I look, but today…I don’t know…today I could not see.”

  Ayaana took the tablet from her hand.

  YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, memory: the ephemeral maps a mother and a girl she loathed were using to search for a soul caught up in a war of worlds that should never have touched their lives. On a lit-up screen, the pair focused on the eyes of boys and men, dead or alive. They imagined they would recognize the long-lashed gaze of a mother’s only son. His name was Suleiman. He used to play marbles and football. Eminem was his icon. Tableau of human anguish revealed by a tablet. Now two women who had been formed by a mostly invisible island studied the geography of Syria’s Ar-Raqqah and Idlib and Homs. They drew finger lines to measure distances between Iraq’s Dahuk, Fallujah, and Samarra. They smiled because in that map they saw a city called Sulaymaniyah. It sounded like “Suleiman.”