Blood spurted from his nostrils in twin rivulets, coursing down his cheeks. It cascaded over his lips, gathering in his mouth before overflowing into viscous streaks down his chin. A crimson torrent shot from the torn arteries of his neck, spattering his skin in jets. His eyes hemorrhaged, and the sockets filled with red, drowning his pupils in blood. His body continued this brutal betrayal of pumping, flowing, and emptying. Suddenly, Kovu was floating in the air. His entire being traveled through the loftiness like a fractured bird yearning for the clouds. Steel voices screamed, wild and persistent, lashing me forward to the very spot where Kovu had breathed his last. If I ran, they would fire at me. If I tried to gather the shattered remnants of Kovu’s body, they would fire at me. If I allowed the screech clawing up my ribs to escape my throat, they would fire. I watched Kovu crumple, legs failing under the weight of his mortality, as he slipped from the world of the living, his blood leached by dirt. His blood, my son’s blood, my blood, sinking, sinking, sinking into the gluttonous earth.
Bititi jerked forward, her arms trying to reach for the remains of our son. “No!” I shouted, but the warning got lost in the roar. They had herded us into an abandoned border zone, a no man’s land where old mines still waited in the earth. The mine detonated beneath her foot, launching her upward before slamming her into the dirt beside Kovu. The ringing in my ears eclipsed the panic that had anchored me to the spot. My legs finally responded, and the Al-Shabaab militia let me pass. I reached her as she struggled to sit up, hands pushed to her face. When she pulled them away, shrapnel had left a map of razor-like scratches across her forehead. But it was her eyes that turned my stomach. The whites had flooded crimson, and her pupils fixated on something past me, searching for a light that had just vanished, a light that was her birthright.
“I can’t see.” Her voice was so calm, it terrified me more than screaming would have. “I can’t see Kovu. Where is he? I need to see him.”
“He’s here,” I said, hugging her against my chest so she could not reach forward to touch the wreckage of our son. “He’s right here.”
“I can’t see him,” she said, her fingers searching my shirt, her own face, and the space between us. “It is dark. Why is it dark? It is morning.”
Morning. Yes. It was morning. I held her in a dawn that would never end, a day that would haunt her for the rest of her life. Her eyes, which had mapped every line of my face and watched Kovu take his first steps with the joy that only mothers know, saw nothing, and would never see anything again. The blast had snatched her vision as effectively as it had taken our son’s life. I was caught in between two bodies: one that would never move again and one that would spend the rest of its days grasping for shadows.
“I cannot see,” she said again, and I felt the final wall of sanity crumble.
*
The barricades in my wife’s eyes terrify me. They resemble river stones, grey as storm clouds. She cannot see through them to me; I cannot see through them to her. She sits on the mkeka, her leso on the floor, spinning Kovu’s small wooden toy car in her palms as she waits for me to dress her. I deliberately delay, slowly slipping a shirt over my shoulders, because the monotony is crushing me. I watch her. Her belly has the round curvature of new life, and her skin is like desert honey pressed thin. Deep gold pools form where her ribs meet her stomach, and stretch marks run over her swelling breasts. I look at her fingers, and it hits me all at once: this is the first time in a long time I am not seeing any paint beneath her fingernails. There is no red, blue, or yellow. Nothing. Back at our home in Bargoni, Lamu, she would paint. Animal portraits, flowers, whatever moved through her mind. Then we would sell them outside the mosques, the two of us standing in the heat with her art spread on a cloth, waiting for someone to stop and admire what she had made. I had forgotten about the paint. I had forgotten that her hands were never clean.
I am glad that Bititi cannot see this wretched environment. The patched tents, open latrines, and children with sunken eyes and bulging tummies. But I think she would have loved the pelicans. I am terrified by her sightlessness, but I am more terrified by what her eyes might see. This claustrophobic tent, fashioned with plastic sheeting, the naked bulb on its frayed cable that only lights when the generator turns on, and the dust that impedes every sweep. I am not sure she could handle what we have been reduced to.
Perhaps her blindness is a form of mercy. I understand the horror of the thought: What kind of man looks at his wife and wishes for darkness to veil her eyes? But if I could forge her a key to unlock a door into another realm, I would beg for her sight to return. I would want her to see the sun cresting the horizon in veils of rose and gold, painting the coral walls of Lamu town. I would want it to spill over the narrow streets and across the harbor where the dhows rocked, past the mangrove channels she knew by heart, and onto the vast Indian Ocean. Kovu would be there too, dashing barefoot through the coral-stone lanes with a few shillings for milk. I try not to think about Kovu. Some mornings, I imagine hearing his voice outside the tent—perhaps he has traveled across the ocean on one of those ships. When I pull back the tent flap, he would be standing there, and I would ask, “How did you get all the way to Dadaab, son? How did you know where to find us?”
I pull Bititi’s dera from the rope in our shelter. It sags across our tent, holding the little we have left. When she hears the fabric move, she stands and raises her arms. This simple act hurts me. She looks much older these days, but behaves like a child, as if she has forgotten herself or is trying to. Her hair is now sand-colored with a distinctive dry texture. I style it into a bun and dress her.
“I see him whenever I close my eyes. In my mind, he is sometimes sitting at the table, eating ugali. He uses his other hand to pick his nose, then wipes it on his shorts. I tell him to stop behaving like his father, and he says, ‘But I love my father!’ and then he laughs.” Bititi’s voice trembles. “That laughter. I can hear it. It flies above the land, disappearing into the distance with the birds. I think this is his soul, it’s free now.”
I sit down on the mkeka and close my eyes, wailing like a child with my entire body and without shame. Suddenly, memories surge in, like something splitting apart in my brain. Life before the attack. Bititi in a red dress, holding Kovu’s hand. He had just begun to walk and was waddling beside her with knock-knees, pointing up at a jet flying across the blue sky. We were heading for the beach. It was December. She walked ahead with her sisters, and I watched them casually, the way one does when unaware of the impending loss of a loved one. Malkia wore blue, and Zora wore pink. Jamila animatedly flapped her arms as she always did when engaged in a debate. The other two simultaneously exclaimed “Yes!” in perfect harmony, as sisters do, as people do when they have known each other their whole lives. That Yes! still echoes in my ears. I hear it across this space and time, and it reminds me of the people we lost.
Beside me was my uncle, Mzee Duruma, his cane tapping on the concrete. He shared his philosophical musings, a gift he often bestowed. His mind was on his café in the Old Town of Mombasa, on his longing to retire—a dream dashed because his son decided the family business wasn’t “aligned with his personal brand.” Gesturing wildly with his free hand, my uncle declared, “He married the peacock for its money and feathers. But the feathers fell out, the money ended, and now he’s stuck with a screaming chicken that struts around, shitting on his carpet and demanding organic feed.”
Bititi brings her face close to mine, and with both hands, she wipes away my tears. She looks into my eyes as if she can see me.
“Tunje,” she says.
“Hmmm?”
“I love you.”
In that moment, I can see her too—the woman inside, the woman I’d lost. She is here with me, her soul open, present, and clear as light. For a few seconds, I am no longer afraid of the journey or the road ahead. But in the next moment, her eyes darken, they die, and she sinks down and away from me.
“We’re in the Lord’s hands now,” she says calmly.
There is a full moon in the sky. Bititi falls asleep with her hands curled beneath her cheeks. She sleeps like a child, which is to say she has not slept like this in months. There is a painting on the bedside stool. I pick it up, and for a brief moment, I am unable to breathe. This is what happens when you discover something you believed was lost forever. The body pauses. The lungs forget their task. You become still, as if stillness will prevent it from disappearing again.
She drew a coconut tree in the concrete garden in Lamu. The colors are correct, and this is the part that tears my heart. Not the grays and blacks she has been sketching for months, not the twisted shapes of a woman attempting to see through darkness, but the genuine colors of the world: the silvery gray bark, the yellow-green of newborn fronds, and the dusty green of elder leaves. The lines and shading appear less distorted. She is finding her way back. The sky is bright and blue, with wisps of clouds and white birds flying.
However, barely visible beneath the tree is a gray sketch. The silhouette of a boy. The pencil marks are soft and swift, giving the impression that he has been caught mid-step, running toward or away from something, alive in the way that only the dead can be alive now—in their minds, their hands, and in every art she will ever make. He is part of this world, yet he is not really here. This is something we must learn to live with. This is what she is teaching me with this image: how to see him and let him go, how to place him in the garden where he belongs, and how to make him gray, soft, a kind of presence that does not require us to stop living in order to remember him.
I stare at this image for a long time. I watch until the moon moves across the tent’s makeshift window, the light shifts, and Bititi awakens from her slumber. And I realize she has been painting her way back—to me, to us, to the world where colors are correct, trees flourish in concrete gardens, and boys run beneath them, present and absent, visible and invisible. There is a shimmer of green on his t-shirt where Bititi started to color him in and then stopped, as though she had suddenly understood something about the nature of ghosts that I had not yet learned. He is half-present, which is to say he is half-absent, which is to say he is like everything else I have ever loved. His face is turned toward the sky. I think he is waiting for something to happen.
I climb into the bed next to her and feel terrified. I have been terrified for so long that it has become a nation in my head, complete with its own weather and laws. I gaze at her body and remember the buildings I saw shimmering in the heat, both there and not there, as when you are losing your mind or learning to see again. My hand travels through the air between us, like a man wading through water. I touch her arm. I touch her hips. I touch her as though she will vanish, as though she is made of something more delicate than flesh. She sighs and moves closer to me, and I realize that I have been so frightened of touching her that I have forgotten what it is to be touched, to have someone tell you that you are real.
In this light, her face is both dreadful and lovely. There are lines around her eyes. The curve of her chin. The hair on her temples. Her neck slopes downward toward her breasts. I see all of this, and then I see him bleeding beside her. I understand what the terrorists accomplished in this regard. I see her eyes. I see the scream that could not escape. I recall doing nothing to save our son. I recall the choice I made, or did not make, which is to say the man I chose to be at the time is who I have been ever since.
I’m shaking. I try but cannot stop. When the mind refuses to act, the body takes charge. And then I realize: I have forgotten to adore her. I have never forgotten that I love her, but I have forgotten to love her—the verb, the action and the daily effort that comes with it. Here’s her body. Here are the lines on her face that I could have prevented, but did not. Here is the sensation of her skin, which I was too afraid to feel. Here’s the wound on her cheek that leads inside her the way a road leads into a place you have never been but must come to recognize as home. These are the pathways we travel when we run out of road.
“Bititi,” I call out.
She opens her eyes as if they had been locked for a long time.
“I’m sorry.”
“What for?”
“I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you or our son.”
She does not say anything, but she wraps her arms around me, and I can smell the flowers she has always smelled like, even in the worst situations and after everything. And then I feel her crying and realize: this is what I have been frightened of. Not her grief, but my knowledge of it, my complicity in it, and the ways in which I have failed her and myself. I lean back to look at her, and what I see bursting from her eyes is everything—sadness, remembrance, love, loss, resentment, and forgiveness, all at once. I kiss her tears. I taste them. They taste like the roads we have traveled, the oceans we have not crossed, and the paths we will cross again in our dreams throughout our lifetimes. I swallow them.
“You couldn’t protect us, Tunje.”
“I know. I’m really sorry.”
I kiss her face and body, and I feel with my lips every inch of her, every line, every scar, all she has seen, carried, and felt, and I am trying to communicate with my lips what I cannot say with words: I know what you went through. I understand what I did not prevent. I know who I was and who I am, and I am asking to show you who I could still be. I rest my head on her stomach, and she places her hand on my head and strokes my hair. It is the closest I have come to prayer in a long time.
“Maybe I can protect our new child.” Even as I say this, I know how close to impossible it is, how presumptuous, how much it asks of me. “One day. They won’t be Kovu, but we’ll tell them everything about him.”
“You won’t forget him?” She is silent. I feel her heartbeat in her belly, that steady drum that says, I am alive, I am alive, I am still alive.
“Do you remember how he loved to play in the garden?” I say.
“Of course I do.”
“And how he pushed that millipede around in his wooden toy car like he was actually taking it somewhere?”
She laughs. I laugh. I feel her laughter vibrate throughout her body.
“And when I bought him a map of the world,” I say, “he made a family with tree branches and sent them out of Kenya.”
“And he didn’t know how to get the branches across the ocean!” she says. “How afraid he always was of the water.”
“And the way he always waited for you at the window when it was time for you to come home.”
And with that final word, home, our world softens. She sighs and falls asleep.
*
Yesterday, I noticed a Somali man in the public bathroom. He was wearing a green T-shirt. When I turned around, he was sitting on the toilet. “You should lock the door,” he said in his dialect of Swahili, which differed from mine. I cannot remember his name. This is what happens now: I meet people and forget them, or I remember them but not their names, or I remember their names but not their faces. He is from a village in Kismayo, near the mouth of the Jubba River. He told me last night that they might send him to a removal center in Nairobi. The social worker believes there is a possibility. It is my turn to meet her today. The Somali man says she is very beautiful, that she looks like a stripper from Kismayo with whom he once made love to long before he married his wife. These are the kind of things men say to each other when they are waiting to be sent away, when they need to remember that they were once men who made love to strippers in motels, men who had wives, men who had lives that were not this. He asked me about life in Lamu. I told him about my coconut farm in Bargoni. I did not tell him what happened to it. He did not ask.
The social worker arrives at one o’clock. All our meetings are held in tents, which is to say that all our judgments are made there. This is where the verdict is delivered: whether we are people who deserve to stay or people who must be sent away. She will want to know how we arrived at this moment. She will look for any reason to disqualify us. I understand this much: if I falter, if I do not convince her that I am not a terrorist, we will not get to stay. We are the unlucky ones simply because we have not fled from the worst place on earth. The Somali man is lucky. He has less to justify. Somalia is one of the worst places in the world, which means his suffering is sufficient. This means there is a hierarchy of pain, and his claim sits high enough on the ledger.
I wake up and sit on the cold ground, holding a bronze pocket watch in both hands, nestling it in my palms like a hatching egg. I stare at it, waiting. But waiting for what? For the watch to start again? For time to move? For the social worker to tell me that we can stay? For our lives to become ours again? When Bititi hears me stirring, she says, “It does not work, you know? It stopped at a different time.” I hold it up in the morning light by its chain and swing it gently, this frozen watch made of bronze, and I think, this is what we are now. Stopped at a different time. It gently sways in the light.
I remember the bronze color of the dolphin statue in the marine park where we lived. Our three-bedroom bungalow sat on a high plain in Bargoni; from up there, we could see the entire architecture, the beautiful domes, and the minarets. We could see everything. I did not know then that I was watching a memory in the making—that all of it would soon stop, just like this bronze watch. Now, in a room in a place I never meant to inhabit, I swing my watch in the light, finally understanding that we are all just stopped time, waiting to see if anyone will wind us up again.
