Black Star Nairobi (12 page)

“I’m glad your mother is feeling better” was all I could say to him.

“She came back from the
hosi
this morning,” O said, falling into Nairobi slang.

Finally his mother, her hands and voice shaking, tears in her eyes, said something to O. He stood up, said something angrily, gesturing at everyone, and took off. Everything had happened so fast. His mother tried to say something to me but I couldn’t understand. An elderly man came over to me and translated it into English.

“She says she loves her son, that in death she forgives Mary. However, her hands are tied. The clan has spoken. She has to do what her people want. In time he will see it was the right thing to do,” he said.

“What do you mean? Mary won’t be buried here?” I asked him in disbelief.

“Should our people simply lie down and be trampled upon like weeds?” he asked as he started to guide me out.

“Is that you or the mother saying that stupid shit? That is her son, out there in pain because her daughter-in-law was shot in the head,” I said to him. I was confused and angry.

“The people have spoken, we now have one voice,” he said and smiled gently at me, as if I were a child and would understand someday.

He placed his hand on my shoulder. I wanted to hit him.

“Fuck off,” I said to him, and he let go. I turned to look at O’s mother; she cast her eyes down and started sobbing as the elders enveloped her.

“Tell Odhiambo we are sorry,” the old man said to me when I got to the door.

I found O lying back on a reclined passenger seat. We had an eight-hour drive ahead of us and I was not looking forward to it.

“All this time wasted … we could have been working,” he
said, more to himself than to me. I started the car without saying a word.

“They won’t let me bury my wife,” O said, looking straight ahead after we’d been driving for an hour or so in silence. “I bought that piece of land, and built that house for my mother, and they will not let me bury my dead wife.” He sounded like he was a bit amused by the ridiculousness of it all, as if he couldn’t believe it.

“Why? Isn’t that the custom?” I asked.

He helped me piece together the reason why. Mary was a Kikuyu and O, a Luo. Living in Nairobi, isolated from their fellow ethnic groups, it had never been an issue—as far as I could tell. In fact, until it was time to bury her, I, as an outsider, couldn’t tell they were from different ethnic groups. They spoke to each other in English but I had always assumed that it was for my benefit. I suppose it’s the difference between interracial marriages in New York and in some backwater Midwestern town.

The elections were tomorrow and the resulting tensions had only heightened ethnocentrism. The president, a Kikuyu, was being opposed by a Luo—it seemed as if Mary’s death had fallen along the same ethnic demarcations. O’s family didn’t want to bury a Kikuyu woman. Would Mary’s family want to bury a woman married to a Luo? I couldn’t ask O. I passed on his mother’s message to him. Now it made sense. Weeds, I knew that term in the context of Rwanda—Muddy, a Tutsi, had been called a “weed.” In the Kenyan context, the Luos and Kikuyus saw each other as weeds.

“You and me, Ishmael, we come from a different world—we have us on one side and criminals on the other—and what matters is getting the criminal even when ethnicity and race run interference. You know what I mean? That’s where we draw the
line. In my mother’s world, one’s ethnicity matters more than life and death itself. She is my wife. I am her son. She is her daughter. But not today—today, ethnicity is god,” O lamented.

O’s marriage had added another dimension to his duality—to his ability to be violent and cruel when in the cruel and violent world of our investigations, and to be loving without residual feelings of guilt when in the loving world of Mary. That balance had collapsed. Now the duality that allowed him to be a Luo married to a Kikuyu had also collapsed under the pressure of the day’s ethnic politics—and it was costing him his home and a burial place for his wife.

I could see a bit of it. When I took Muddy—an African refugee who did spoken word—to the U.S. to meet my parents, how would their black middle-class sensibilities take it? I was supposed to marry up—that’s what they had liked about my ex-wife and her corporate-ladder climbing. When I said I wanted to become a cop, it was not so much that they hated the profession, though it made them uneasy; it was because it was beneath us. So their son who was a cop working in Kenya was marrying a Rwandan refugee who did spoken word? They would have something to say about that.

“What did you tell your mother … the clan?” I asked him.

“I told her that I loved my wife and that they might as well have killed me too. I asked her how I could bury my wife elsewhere and still call this place home? How can I come back here? How do I forgive that? And how do I live with myself after costing Mary her life? I asked her all those questions and you know what she told me? She said she understands my pain but this was no longer just about a man and his wife, but about what our people want,” he explained, anger carrying each word.

“O, she seemed genuinely in pain,” I said to him.

“Pain without action is useless to me,” he replied tensely.

“Hey, I don’t know a lot, but this much I know. You cannot blame yourself for Mary’s death,” I said, not even sure if I believed that myself.

O laughed a laugh that was somewhere between incredulity and anger. The kind of laugh that told me that if we hadn’t been friends, his response would’ve been more forceful.

“Jesus, Ishmael, what the fuck? If she hadn’t been married to me, she wouldn’t be dead. It’s that simple. I am responsible for her death. And so are you. And so is Sahara. We will all have to pay somehow. It’s just the way it is now,” he said, pushing himself against the passenger seat as if trying to still himself.

I felt like shit for having said what I said. I had to agree that he was right. The fact was that without him, without us rattling the bushes, Mary would still be alive. We hadn’t killed her—yet we had. Even after we found out why she had died and brought those responsible to some form of justice, we would still be responsible for her death.

The bottom line was that I could not imagine what he was going through. I had never lost anyone close to me—I had lost cop friends, but I’m talking about someone I truly loved, who I saw every day, who I lived and fought with. I couldn’t imagine what it was like to have that gone—what the first morning after, and then the next and the next … what that emptiness was like.

We were now close to Nakuru, and I was about to joke about going to Lake Nakuru to see flamingoes, when we turned a corner and found ourselves in front of a group of young men armed with rocks, bows and arrows, and machetes that I guessed to be part of the Chinese machete shipment seized earlier in Mombasa.
They were chanting “Down with Kibaki! Up with Raila!” Some of them were still in their school uniforms, while others, nicely dressed, appeared to have joined the crowd after work. It looked more like a celebration than a war party. We slowed down and drove through them, until they suddenly stopped moving and we had to stop as well or run them over.

I rolled down my window. I could smell alcohol on their breath. They said something to us. I looked over at O.

“They want to know what we are—which ethnicity,” O translated.

“American,” I said, finding the whole thing a bit amusing—fucking bows and arrows?

“
Kipande
?” Now, that I knew meant “ID.” O showed them his badge and they sobered up for a minute. O asked them something.

“We are Kalenjin, warriors … like Rambo,” one of them replied and laughed, pointing at me.

“Or Terminator,” another one said. O shook his head. They waved us through. Luos were okay and Americans were most welcome.

“What if we had been Kikuyu?” I asked him, feeling unsettled by the whole thing.

“A few insults, your mother this, your mother that, a few slaps … that’s it—they are just kids,” O replied.

“You keep saying that,” I said to him.

“And you keep being American—it comes in handy, you know … goodwill …” he retorted.

There was something I had to tell him—my fuck-up with Sahara—how if I had shot the driver, Sahara would have been dead or ours. He listened and was silent for a while.

“It’s okay, Ishmael, but let me tell you something—understand
that this world, our world is not what it was two weeks ago—you cannot order it to some moral code,” he said.

“They opened the door, Ishmael—they opened the fucking door—and you know what? We never really had a choice but to enter their hell. And I am not talking about some simple revenge shit and what it requires, I am talking about justice. You have seen what they are capable of. To get Sahara, to get justice, we have to use their fucked-up moral code. Either that or we walk away … Right now!” He banged his hand on the dashboard.

“You let Jamal walk … why?” I asked him.

“Jamal—where is the justice in killing him? When it came down to it, he tried, even if it was to save himself. We owed him our lives from way back when. That debt has been paid,” he said.

“Did you know your gun was empty?” I asked.

“Did I know my gun was empty?” he repeated my question without answering.

My friend was hurting—his wife was dead, his family had abandoned him when he needed them the most, denied him the kind of closure that comes with being held close by family as he grieved. I vowed to myself to be there with him when he walked through the door that Sahara had opened.

Wanting to lose myself in the case, I was dreading going back into O’s apartment, but as we neared his door, we could hear laughter. We went in to find Janet and Muddy going through Mary’s clothes. Janet was holding up a mini-skirt and boots, an outfit that was so unlike Mary that I too couldn’t help laughing.

Janet rushed to O and started crying. Muddy stood up and I walked to her. We held each other and my world felt real again.
Then she patted me on the shoulder, went to Janet, and guided her back to the pile of belongings.

O rolled a joint and sat with them among piles of Mary’s books and clothes. I opened a bottle of whiskey and sat down too. With a joint passing between O and Muddy, and a bottle between Janet and me, we mourned.

O took us back to their early days when they had just started dating—a cop and a schoolteacher, who happened to be Luo and Kikuyu—“as if we didn’t have enough differences.”

When they first met, he hadn’t even made detective yet. He was a constable called to her school because someone had broken in and made off with grounds maintenance equipment, wheelbarrows, shears, and the like. He saw her as she was walking to lunch. He tried to get himself invited along. She said no. He kept coming back to her school and questioning potential witnesses until she said yes.

“That case of the missing
wheelbarrow
has never been solved to this day,” he declared to our laughter. “But the case of lonely hearts was.”

Muddy suggested finishing the exams Mary had been grading, but the math was too difficult for us. We didn’t stop to think about whether we were doing the right thing when we passed all her students—Janet was going to take Mary’s last gift to her students in the morning.

We couldn’t get ourselves to cook. There was a twenty-four-hour Kenchic around the corner and I rushed there to get some chicken and chips. When I came back, it was to find Kenny Rogers blaring throughout the apartment, his raspy country voice belting out the almost soulful “She Believes in Me.”

Neighbors knocked on the door and I opened it, thinking they had come to complain, but it was to join us. Seeing there
wouldn’t be enough food, they went back to their kitchens and came with whatever leftovers they had. On the sitting room floor where just hours before Mary had lain dead, all sorts of dishes were laid out
—ugali
, fish, chapattis, boiled maize and beans, cabbage and eggs and a curry of one thing or another, fermented milk and porridge—you name it. It was as if all of Kenya’s ethnicities were represented in the dishes.

“Hey, Muddy, I missed your performance,” Janet yelled, to drown out the calls for “The Gambler” to be rewound.

Muddy stood up a bit unsteadily and let her dreads hang out. That got the attention of the mourners-turned-party revelers.

“A song, a painting, a poem, a word is a story. So let me tell you a story, a story about …” She seemed lost, and smiled, as if inviting us to tell her what the story should be. She continued after the pause.

“Let me tell you a story about a word—one word that is as old as the very earth we walk on, a word that crosses boundaries, that swims underneath the currents of culture, a word that is a language, a word that is the language. Let me tell you a story about the word ‘love.’ When love was born, love was living. This love that was newborn and old, an old woman, this love decided to walk the earth. And young love said to older love, or was it the other way round? Love said to love, Love is birth, Love is living and Love is death, Love is gentle, Love is fierce, Love is violent, Love is living and Love is death, Love is God and Love is the Devil, and Love forgets more than it remembers, but tonight, this morning that is still a night …”

She took a few deep breaths that cut through our quietness.

“Love is the vehicle that drove us here, Love is Mary, Love is O, and Love is us. I love you, O.”

No one said anything and for that one moment, I felt
love like it was a human being walking among us, a physical thing, something that I could touch. That was not the poem she had performed at the Carnivore, not even close. It was something new.

Then there was the sound of a rewinding cassette, a few miscues to the beginning of “The Gambler,” and we went back to singing along. As the party continued, some of the neighbors went to the kitchen, found food containers, and packed away the now twice leftover food into O’s fridge. Dishes were cleaned, and the floor cleared of bottles and mopped. It didn’t matter that most of the neighbors hardly spoke to each other, that they were from different ethnicities, or that they had to go to work the following day—they kept O company till six in the morning, talking and laughing about things peculiarly Kenyan, peppering me with questions about America and Muddy about Rwanda, and occasionally all of us sang along to a Kenny Rogers song.