What Tears Us Apart

Chapter 14



December 17, 2007, Kibera—Leda

SUNDAY HAD BEEN a lazy day of finishing up the murals and lounging on the mat, teaching the children how to play hangman and tic-tac-toe.

Come Monday, as they waved goodbye to the boys on their way off to school, Leda said to Ita, “Let’s go into Nairobi today.” Ita turned to her quizzically. She knew he must have work he’d been putting off. She sped up her case. “I want to get a suitcase I left checked at the hotel. And I have things I’d like to get for the boys. And—” Leda knew she was about to blush, and she still couldn’t believe Ita brought out such schoolgirl reactions just by looking at her with those big eyes. “I thought I... I’d like to... Figured the least I could do...was take you to lunch.”

He smiled instantly. “Lunch?”

Leda begged her cheeks to stop boiling. She knew it was a useless endeavor.

He nodded. “I have to check my mailbox in Nairobi. And I would love to have lunch with you.”

She smiled, way too big. “Okay. Great. I’ll just—” She spun around before finishing her sentence, her cheeks competing to head up Santa’s sleigh.

As she walked back to her room, Leda felt her heart flapping like hummingbird wings. She couldn’t stop the sing-song thought in her head. I’ve got a date.

In her room, feeling light-headed and clumsy, she swapped her sandals for tennis shoes and brushed her hair into a ponytail. She smeared on her sunscreen with trembling fingers.

She applied mascara and lip gloss, then rifled through her suitcase for more products, contemplating that blue eyeshadow that had to be somewhere, and blush. Yeah, right. First of all, she certainly didn’t need any more help blushing. Secondly, any more makeup would melt right off in the day’s heat.

In any case, Ita had spent a whole week with her sans makeup and he still seemed pretty smiley about their date. She allowed herself a little shimmy of her hips before opening the door calmly to find him waiting right outside.

His smile stretched from ear to ear. “Ready?”

“Ready.”

Off they went, Ita leading the way as usual, and Leda trying not to go down in the muck.

But today, she finally felt as if she was getting the hang of it. A week ago, she couldn’t figure out why people didn’t just move in two directions—on the right and left side of the ditch. Now she knew it was because you couldn’t. The ground was so uneven, it was impossible to stay balanced in a straight line—you’d slip straight into the ditch of sewage. So you had to hop back and forth from one side to the other, jumping in and out of the way of passersby like a dance. It was actually quite fun.

The other amazing thing was that in the dizzying expanse of identical mud shacks, Leda recognized their route to the main road. She knew the charging station, the beauty salon, the stall where Mary bought the charcoal and another where she bought soap and canned foods. Leda looked around for the path to the place they bought their water, but that one escaped her. On that walk, she’d staggered along under the weight of two massive jugs of water, her teeth gritted the whole way.

Leda kept up with Ita easily at first, her footing sure and fast, but after a few more twists and turns, she was as lost as ever.

“Are we going a different way?”

“Yes,” Ita said. “Almost there.”

The path took a hard right and she saw where it ended—in a giant parking lot. Now she understood the roar of noise she’d heard in the distance. Squared-off minivans called matatus lined up and jerked around each other like bumper cars, their drivers shouting and smiling in equal measure. Children were everywhere. As usual, when they spotted Leda, they swarmed around her, calling hi-how-are-you-how-are-you-how-are-you. Now Leda knew it wasn’t a question. It was synonymous with, Hey look, a white lady. Look at you, white lady!

Ita left her mobbed by kids and approached several matatu drivers. At the third one, he waved her over.

Leda untangled herself from the children and wove through the throng of people. No lines. It was a free-for-all.

Most of the matatus were white or tan, one sliding door and three square windows in back, a minibus. The majority had seen better days, were purely functional.

But there were others. Ones as shiny as any Ferrari, in red and yellow or black and purple, with racing stripes, graffiti, graphics and paint jobs like an illegal East L.A. drag race. They brandished spray-painted names like Brutal, Pyscho and Black Betty. The one Ita waited at was tattooed with a voluptuous woman and the name So Sick. Leda froze and gaped.

Ita laughed. “Come on!”

She stepped forward and he steered her inside the vehicle, into the first row of three seats. She scooted over to the window seat and he jammed in beside her. A couple squished in next, the girl sitting on the boy’s lap. Five men of various ages piled in, then another trail of young boys squeezed past into the last row. It all happened so fast, Leda’s head spun like a washing machine.

Another man tried to squeeze in on their row, but Ita barked at him and reached across the woman’s lap to shut the door.

People started passing forward their fare money. Once the door shut, it was almost dark. All windows but the windshield were tinted black, and the inside of the van was all black, too. Black lights rimmed the top, making the graffiti inside fluoresce.

The young driver revved the engine and veered off into the fray, shifting gears like a race-car driver. Music banged from the speakers at decibels Leda knew with painful certainty would result in tinnitus somewhere down the line. When she opened her eyes from wincing, she saw the mounted screen played rap videos to accompany the music.

Only when Leda saw Ita laughing at her did she realize her mouth was still open as if she had a broken jaw. Not that she could hear him laughing over the music, but seeing him made her laugh, too, because the whole scene was pretty funny.

As the matatu climbed the hill, she watched the expanse of Kibera from above—the checkerboard of rusted metal roofs bulging out from either side of the railway. Leda saw the towering wall topped with barbed wire that separated the wealthy suburbs and shielded them from having to contemplate Kibera over their morning coffee. But they were headed in the other direction, past the blocky beige apartment buildings, presumably public housing with their uniform drab hue and flapping laundry strung above dirt yards full of weary mothers and scampering children.

Driving away was different than driving in. It wasn’t that Leda was used to Kibera, exactly, but that now she saw it with different eyes. Instead of reading about the water problem in a guidebook, she could see it clearly—water pipes running through and under Kibera into Nairobi to feed the golf courses and the government lawns rushing green past her window. This meant water had to be brought back into Kibera, bought at exorbitant prices, five to a hundred times what people paid in those government apartments one mile away.

Was that what Ita was thinking about? Did he have new eyes, too, now that she’d been staying at the orphanage? Did sitting beside her make him think of the injustice? Did she represent everything that was wrong with the world—entitlement, disparity of wealth, racism, elitism, a hundred other isms that made a place—no, a phenomenon—like Kibera somehow possible?

Outside her window, Leda watched the billboards—incumbent President Kibaki and challenger Raila Odinga vying for drivers’ eyes, minds and hearts. Could Odinga really change things? Would he make Kibera a priority, as he claimed? How much would it cost to build large-scale water projects and public housing? Sanitation facilities? Leda was beginning to understand what this election could mean. Where in the U.S. she was excited about Obama for his lofty ideals—bipartisanism, responsibility, youth empowerment—here, an election win could mean water, food, life and death.

Leda sneaked glances at the other passengers, all of them presumably residents of Kibera. The men mostly stared straight ahead, bopping their heads to the music and looking cool, like young men everywhere acted in the presence of gangsta rap. The couple shouted into each other’s ears, as if they were in a nightclub, then nuzzled one another, oblivious to the world as they bumped and rubbed along. The election was in a little over a week. Leda felt excited for them. She imagined the celebration in Kibera if Raila Odinga won.


January 1, 2008, Kibera—Ita

It’s another two hours before Ita hears any movement in the hidden room from his post on the stool. Though his body aches, he gives Samuel as much time and privacy as he needs.

When the door scrapes open, Samuel fills the frame, Mercy’s body cradled in his arms.

Ita nods. He rises slowly and leads the way to the front gate. Samuel doesn’t say a word as they pass through the courtyard. Respecting the sleeping children or lost in grief, Ita doesn’t know.

At the gate, the two men’s eyes meet across the threshold. There are no more words to be spoken. No gratitude. No apologies. Just the look between strangers that says kwaheri and kila la kheri.

Goodbye and better luck to you in this mad world.

After Samuel’s gone, Ita trudges back to the little room. With bleach and water, he scrubs the blood from the metal table and gathers up the bloody blankets. He cleans himself, too, with the last of the hydrogen peroxide.

An hour passes before Ita reappears in the moonlight and carries his stool to the front gate.

He leans his head against the metal, and before he knows it, he’s fitfully asleep and dreaming of Leda.

He sees her face, her alabaster skin glowing in the light of the stars. But then suddenly there’s blood everywhere—dripping into Leda’s green eyes, down the ends of her dark hair, bubbling over her lips, spilling down her neck. She’s trying to speak, but can only gurgle. Now she’s on the metal table in the hidden room. She’s wearing Mercy’s clothes, her soaked underwear, her body is bludgeoned by machetes. Save me, that’s what she’s trying to say. Save me. Ita—

* * *

As he gasps awake, one hand on his throat and the other reaching out to keep the rifle from falling to the ground, Ita sees the night has finally passed. He can’t see the sun yet over the orphanage walls, but it’s out there, rising, relentless, throwing spears of light into the smoke.

A noise outside makes him jump to his feet and realize that perhaps it wasn’t the dream that woke him but rather whatever is out there.

The answer comes as a soft knock at the gate. His heart leaps into his throat as he stares down the metal door.

We are not safe here. They should flee like everybody else was fleeing to their villages, their homelands. Kikuyu is a death sentence now. Ironic, since Ita has no Kikuyu family. Never had Kikuyu neighbors or relatives come forward to help them. As far as Ita is concerned, he has no tribe, no ancestral village. But that also means they have nowhere to go.

He tries to think. It’s the first light of dawn. Early. Who could it be? A neighbor wanting food? Mary returning?

“Ita.”

His mind stops dashing over possibilities and plunges into a vortex of time. His ears ring in the silence as he strains to hear the voice again, to see if it could be true. Ita would recognize that voice in a monsoon, the voice that haunts him in the darkest hours of the night.

“Ita,” the woman’s voice comes again. Not pleading. Not begging. Just there, existing, waiting.

And then he is staggering forward, tripping, fumbling with the gate.

Even when he sees her, he doesn’t believe it.

But there she is.

Kioni.