What Tears Us Apart

Chapter 20



January 1, 2008, Kibera—Ita

IT’S NEARLY MIDNIGHT when Ita leaves the boys’ room, letting the sheet fall, wishing they had built a door along with the bunk beds. Slinging the rifle over his shoulder bangs the stitches he gave himself and he winces as he makes his way to Kioni’s post near the orphanage door.

Outside, close, a baby’s been crying for hours, since before the sun dove into darkness. The sound is broken periodically by other screams, louder, higher-pitched—mothers and children too old to be crying like that.

Ita listens, feeling every muscle in his body pulled taut as though jerked by a puppet master. His mind races, considering the crying anew, deciding if there is a threat.

Now Ita knows the stories. Earlier this evening, he and Kioni snuck into his office to listen to the radio. The things they heard—women raped in front of their husbands, children trampled and killed, men with panga wounds to their skulls, left to bleed to death in the street—he and Kioni could only stare at each other in disbelief. Next came the dawning understanding that they would be barricaded in the orphanage, under siege for who knew how long. The announcer’s voice sounded scared as he rushed on. Live TV coverage suspended. Riots everywhere, not just in Kibera, but even in the tree-lined streets of Nairobi. Thousands fled, thousands more hiding—no one to clear the bodies. Raila’s supporters, Luo protesters, now feeling the full vengeance of Kikuyu.

“They asleep?” Kioni turns, sees Ita standing there, frozen.

“Or willing to pretend,” he says.

“They are good boys,” she says as he sits down stiffly beside her.

Each point of contact sends pain shooting through his nerves. He can feel Kioni watching him, noting his wounds but saying nothing.

They took turns that day tending the children. Kioni moved her things to the boys’ room and slept some. Then she served the boys lunch while Ita chased sleep in his stuffy room. It was a futile endeavor. Every time he closed his eyes, buried memories of Kioni and Chege mixed with more recent nightmares until he became paranoid that something bad was about to happen with Kioni on guard.

Like a gullet full of lead, Ita still feels the conditioned urge to protect her. But her silence fills him with dread, not to mention a running tally of his faults.

Now that the boys are in bed, the reviled feeling comes stronger, as much as he tries to shake it—he should feel grateful for her help, not this pinching desire for her to leave.

Side by side, they sit and listen to the horror movie playing just outside. Ita keeps the rifle in his lap, his fingers already stiff from clenching the metal. His whole body is tense, ready to fight the world and knowing that eventually he will have to.

“The boys, they talk about a white woman. Leda.”

Ita’s heart nearly stops at the sound of Leda’s name on Kioni’s lips.

“They think she is coming to save them.”

Ita opens his mouth, but finds no words to respond. Even though both women sat here in this very spot, destined to share the same reservoir of regret in his heart, Kioni and Leda in his mind are like two continents crashing in the ocean.

“Her things are here. They showed me. Is she coming back?”

Kioni’s words lance his heart, especially the boys’ impossible fantasy that Leda will return.

“Ita?”

He still can’t bring himself to answer.

“Well, they are right to worry,” Kioni says. “There is not nearly enough food. Supplies. Water. Do you have money to last—”

“Very little.” He’d paid most of the safari money toward bills when they came back through Nairobi. And on Christmas presents.

“Ita, what happened here? To her? To you?”

He clenches his teeth, says finally: “She’s gone. Leda left the night of...of the riots.”

“As she should have. This is no place for a mzungu.”

“Stop. Please. Just—” Ita’s teeth feel as if they will crumble into his jaw.

“Leave? Do you want me to go?”

Yes. “No, you cannot go back out there. You have to stay.”

Silence.

Silence and screams in the night.

“If she isn’t coming back, maybe we should sell her things.”

“No!” The volume of Ita’s voice startles them both. He frowns—doesn’t Kioni think he would have considered that? Even if it would kill him emotionally, he would do it for the children. “It’s impossible in Kibera now. And unsafe.” So many things were impossible now. Ita sighs. “Please,” he says softly, “please do not speak to me of her again.”

Kioni is studying him, her eyes boring into his skin. “Ita, it’s not your fault she left.”

A bitter snort escapes him. “I could have protected her. It was my fault she got hurt.”

The statement hovers in the air between them, accusing and remembering, growing like a monster under a full moon. Until they have to look at each other, hear the echo of his words dripping with regret, swollen with the sorrow that belongs to the memory that binds them, the one that drove them apart.

“Oh, Ita,” Kioni says. She lays a hand gently on his shoulder.

He flinches as if she struck him.

“Ita!” The front door rattles like a demon banging from the underworld. Kioni and Ita jump to their feet, terror lighting their faces on fire. Ita aims the rifle at the door. Kioni backs away.

“Ita,” the voice comes again. “Let me in!”

Ita and Kioni look at each other, each registering the voice at the same time. Chege.

Ita hesitates, keeps the rifle where it is, jabbing the air. Kioni looks at him strangely, back and forth between him and the door, hearing the frantic shuffle of Chege’s feet, his desperate banging.

“Ita,” she hisses. But she doesn’t know. She doesn’t understand.

“Shhh,” he says. But the knocking only intensifies. Chege begins hollering nonsense, his words spraying the orphanage like shattering glass.

Ita lowers the rifle. He will tell him to go away. Forever. To go away forever or he will kill him. He undoes the lock, slides open the rusted metal and meets Chege face-to-face.

“Go away,” he says through closed teeth.

Chege stares, his eyes like a wild animal in flight. He shifts back and forth on his feet, looks behind him worriedly, back at Ita, then back into the street. His clothes are torn and filthy. His right eye is engorged with blood, his nose swollen monstrously where Ita punched him. He’s barefoot, with more bloody cuts on his arms and legs. In one hand dangles his machete. “Please, they coming. I have to come in. I have to tell you. You don’t understand. Ita—”

Chege tries to worm his way in, then glimpses Kioni in the shadows. His desperation flips to confusion and he stares at her as if she’s a ghost fluttering down from the sky.

She, too, is stunned, but her lips curl in disgust at his appearance. “Chege. Yes, it’s me.”

While they stare at each other, Ita peers into the darkness behind Chege, realizing in an instant what might be following him. Ita remembers the police that dragged Leda away, the look on their faces that said they’d been given free reign to murder at will in the name of the law, how lucky he was to escape that fate at their hands.

Lost in the memory, Ita is caught off guard as Chege rushes the gate, knocking him off balance and squeezing his way inside.

“Ita,” he says and stops. “Ita,” he begins again and stops. It’s as if he’s short-circuiting. He drops his machete to the ground with a clatter, pulls at his dreads, rubs his eyes, scratches at his shoulders.

He is like a dog gone rabid. Ita feels ready to shoot him if he bites.

But then Chege does something wholly unexpected. He slumps to the ground, between Ita and Kioni. He reaches out and grasps both of their legs at once, with such force that they slam together. Chege starts to sob uncontrollably.

Ita and Kioni find themselves face-to-face, inches apart and quivering with Chege’s cries. And Ita knows if anyone could understand his twin hatred and loyalty to Chege, it is Kioni. If anyone has reason to hate or love him as much as Ita, it is she.

But where does loyalty end?

Chege staggers to his feet, thrusting them apart. Kioni and Ita stumble backward. Chege is up, weaving like a boxer about to go back down.

“Oh,” he says, and starts to moan. He looks back and forth between Ita and Kioni. Then he takes his head in his hands and swings back and forth. “Oh, oh, ohh. I’m sorry. Ita. Brother.”

Kioni stares.

Ita’s heart goes cold.

“I’m sorry,” Chege whispers, his eyes closed.

Ita looks away, disgusted. But Kioni’s eyes fill with tears. Her brown eyes, all grown up, force Ita to remember. Remember when things were different. Remember when they were a family.


November 29, 1991, Kibera—Ita

“Get closer!” Chege barks, pushing Ita and Kioni deeper into the scavenged crate, so his head is the only one that sticks out in the storm. Ita can feel Kioni shivering, so he wraps his cold arms tight around her, as if he can hug warmth into her by sheer force of will.

Chege spends equal time on the lookout for thieves and gazing upon Ita and Kioni as if they are a riddle he is trying to solve.

The smell is even more awful than usual, and Ita knows it is sewage that runs into the crate. They’re downhill from the biggest latrine in the ward, and Ita now sees why this area was clear to set up camp.

“We should move,” Ita says between chattering teeth. “To a hill.” It isn’t that cold, and he wonders briefly if he has a fever. He presses his forehead against Kioni’s cheek to see if he can feel a temperature difference. Trying to still both their shivering, he watches the brown liquid seep over his sandals.

Chege frowns and Ita knows he realizes the error of their position, too. But since Chege always acts as leader, he wants to be the one to decide.

Kioni starts to weep. Silently, but Ita can feel it eclipse her shivering.

They sit like this for some time before Chege starts to sing. It is a folk song, but Chege always sings it like a nursery rhyme.

Hakuna matata, Kenya nchi nzuri, nchi ya maajabu, nchi ya kupendeza, hakuna matata...

The lyrics would be funny enough in their situation—no worries, Kenya is beautiful and peaceful, there is no cause for worries—but then Chege would always break off into his own lyrics, whatever fit. This time, shit running between our toes and Kioni shivering like a wet cat.

For once, however, Kioni doesn’t smile at Chege’s off-key singing. She lifts her chin off Ita’s arm and stares at Chege, dead-on.

“I can do it. That girl Maryham, she told me how. She made it sound nice. A meal first and a dry room. I can help us—”

Chege cuts her off with a grunt and a wave of his fist. Then his fist becomes a pointed finger and he angles it straight at her. “Listen to me, little sister. You will never do those things.”

“I can change all of this,” she says in a firm voice that falters with the dawning realization that she is defying him. But she finishes by sweeping her arm over them—their ragged clothes and the filthy ground.

Chege leans into their makeshift shelter, close enough that Ita can feel his breath hot on his arm. “But you will kill us all with your shame.”

Ita looks up, surprised. They do twenty things a day to be ashamed of—stealing, begging, dodging police. Ita knows Chege sniffs glue, too, although he tries to hide that from them.

Watching Chege take heaving breaths, Ita thinks he is thinking the same thing, his faraway look watching a movie of the bad things he’s done.

“We are a family,” Chege says. “Hustling, stealing—these things you will pay back when you get out of Kibera, go to school and work. But you, Kioni, your body, your soul, we cannot get back. And Ita’s heart would turn black along with yours. It would be better to die right now, in a river of shit, than to send you to hell for us. You understand?”

Kioni nods with a whimper and burrows her chin into Ita’s arm for comfort. When Chege turns to him, Ita nods, too. Then he finds Kioni’s big brown eyes carrying the weight of the world like a sack of coal with no way to burn it.


January 2, 2008, Kibera—Ita

“Chege, it’s okay. Come here.” Kioni opens her arms to him, but they stick out like bare branches. Chege paces just outside her reach.

“They’re coming. They’re coming for me.” He crouches down on his haunches and rocks himself.

Ita can’t move. It’s all he can do to stay upright in the waves of feeling crashing over him. His blood still boils, but it isn’t as simple as fury. He loathes Chege, he loves him, he yearns to see him beg, cry, grovel...so that what? He can forgive him? How could he ever forgive him?

Ita looks to the door, up to the night sky. When the police come, can he really turn Chege in? Let them lock him away? Isn’t that everything Chege deserves and more?

Chege looks up from the ground. “Ita. Listen to me—”

“No!” Ita shouts, finally finding his voice. “You listen. Always, I have acted like I owe you my life. But you—you ruined my life.” He points at Kioni. “You ruined all of us. Kioni. And Leda—” He looks away before Chege can see the tears welling.

It’s then that he hears his name whispered in the distance. He turns and Michael’s head hangs out of the boys’ room.

“Go back inside!” Ita shouts. What is he thinking, letting Chege in here like this? He has to leave.

Ita turns back to Chege, heaped in the dirt. This is where loyalty ends.

“Chege, you owe me no confession. I saw what you did to her—”

Kioni’s head jerks up.

“We are done,” Ita says, nailing the coffin. “Anything I owed you is paid.”

Like God echoing Ita’s words, whispers ripple through the night. A legion of boots shuffles in the dirt outside, surrounding the orphanage.

Kioni’s wide eyes register the foreboding sounds.

But Chege has eyes only for Ita. A look oozes down his face like acid melting iron. A noise utters from his throat—a whimper of pain.

“Go,” Ita says.

Chege flinches. His moist eyes dig deeper into Ita’s, but not to plead. He is stone crumbling to dust. The wildfire in Chege’s eyes goes out, his twitching ceases, his limbs hang limp at his sides.

When he finally nods, slowly, Ita feels a twinge in his stomach. Followed by a chill that whips through him like the premonition of a storm.

Then Chege’s up, springing for the gate. He slides it wide open.

His sudden appearance catches the police by surprise. Four officers gape as he charges past the muzzles of their guns.

There is a second where everything slows to the speed of honey and Ita watches with his heart rising into his throat. He sees Chege, the eleven-year-old boy slicing his arm with the machete, smearing his face with his own blood.

The officers raise their rifles as Chege fumbles with his belt.

Ita hears the songs Chege sang, his laugh in the night, teasing him, pushing him to study.

When Chege reaches the dirt road, he thrusts his arms out to either side, Christ on the cross, lit up in the red dust by distant fire.

In his right hand, glinting in the moonlight, is a gun.

Ita squeezes shut his eyes. He hears himself and Chege playing kickball in the alley, Chege making jokes to pretend they aren’t starving.

One shot.

Chege fires one shot into the night air, inciting the officers to fire at will. They gun him down like a sack of flour, like a paper target.

So many bullets mow Chege’s back that he flails in the air, suspended like wet, heavy laundry pinned out to dry. But when the shots cease, Chege’s body drops to the dirt.

And Kioni does the same, falling atop Ita’s feet, dissolving into the cloud of fiery dust that rises around them both. She clamps her hands over her mouth, biting down on her screaming heart.