Dreams from My Father

father’s pain. My questions were my brothers’ questions. Their struggle, my birthright.
    A light rain began to fall, the drops tapping on the leaves above. I was about to light a cigarette when I felt a hand on my arm. I turned to find Bernard squatting beside me, trying to fit the two of us under a bent-up old umbrella.
    “They wanted me to see if you were okay,” he said.
    I smiled. “Yeah. I’m okay.”
    He nodded, his eyes squinting at the clouds. He turned back to me, and said “Why don’t you let me have a cigarette, and I will sit and smoke with you.”
    I looked at his smooth, dark face, and put the cigarette back in the box. “I need to quit,” I said. “Come on, let’s take a walk instead.”
    We stood up and started toward the entrance to the compound. The young boy, Godfrey, was standing beside the cooking hut, one leg propped like a crane’s against the mud wall. He looked at us and offered a tentative smile.
    “Come on,” Bernard said, waving to the boy. “You can walk with us.” And so the three of us made our way over the widening dirt road, picking at leaves that grew along the way, watching the rain blow down across the several valleys.

EPILOGUE
    I REMAINED IN K ENYA FOR two more weeks. We all returned to Nairobi and there were more dinners, more arguments, more stories. Granny stayed in Auma’s apartment, and each night I fell asleep to their whispering voices. One day we gathered at a photography studio for a family portrait, and all the women wore flowing African gowns of bright greens and yellows and blues, and the men were all tall and shaven and neatly pressed, and the photographer, a slight Indian man with bushy eyebrows, remarked on what a handsome picture we made.
    Roy flew back to Washington, D.C., shortly after that; Granny returned to Home Squared. The days suddenly became very quiet, and a certain melancholy settled over Auma and me, as if we were coming out of a dream. And maybe it was the sense that we, too, would soon be returning to our other lives, once again separate and apart, that made us decide one day to go to see George, our father’s last child.
    It turned out to be a painful affair, arranged hastily and without the mother’s knowledge: we simply drove with Zeituni to a neat, single-story schoolhouse, where a group of schoolchildren were playing in a wide, grassy field. After a brief conversation with the teacher supervising the recess, Zeituni led one of the children over to us. He was a handsome, roundheaded boy with a wary gaze. Zeituni leaned down and pointed at Auma and me.
    “This is your sister,” she said to the boy, “who used to play with you on her knee. This is your brother, who has come all the way from America to see you.”
    The boy shook our hands bravely but kept glancing back at games he’d just left. I realized then that we’d made a mistake. Soon the principal of the school emerged from her office to say that unless we had the mother’s permission, we would have to leave. Zeituni began to argue with the woman, but Auma said, “No, Auntie, she’s right. We should go.” From the car, we watched George return to his friends, quickly indistinguishable from the others with round heads and knobby knees who were chasing a scuffed football through the grass. I found myself suddenly remembering then my first meeting with the Old Man, the fear and discomfort that his presence had caused me, forcing me for the first time to consider the mystery of my own life. And I took comfort in the fact that perhaps one day, when he was older, George, too, might want to know who his father had been, and who his brothers and sisters were, and that if he ever came to me I would be there for him, to tell him the story I knew.
    That evening, I asked Auma if she knew of any good books on the Luo, and she suggested we go visit a former history teacher of hers, a tall, willowy woman named Dr. Rukia Odero, who had been a friend of the Old Man’s. When we arrived at her house, Dr. Odero was about to sit down for dinner, and she insisted that we join her. Over a meal of tilapia and
ugali,
the professor insisted I call her Rukia, then asked me about my impressions of the country. Had I been disappointed? she wondered. I told her that I hadn’t, although I was leaving with as many questions as answers.
    “That’s good,” Rukia said, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “That’s how we historians make a living, you know. All day long we sit,