The Brightest Sun

The man leaned down and studied the sleeping baby.

“A girl?” he whispered, and reached out as if he wanted to touch the baby with his fingertips to check if she was real, but he stopped before finger met cheek. He glanced at Leona’s face and then away again. She couldn’t read him. He folded his lanky body and knelt on the dirt floor next to where she lay, up on the raised bed of rawhide stretched and dried to stiffness on a frame of sticks.

Watching the man now, here, in her home, Leona realized that although she had no idea what he was called, she knew a lot of other things about him. He’d grown up on a cattle ranch in Solai—close to Maasailand—and had a profound understanding of the Maasai and a fluency in their ways. He knew many of the elders in Leona’s manyatta. This was what had impressed Leona the night they met and caused her to feel that unfamiliar yearning stretch through her. He made her feel comfortable, so she didn’t hesitate when he gently picked her hand up off the bar and told her to follow him to his room. She liked his coarse blond hair and his sunburned, peeling arms that wrapped around her in the night, and his wide, calloused fingers rough on her breasts. While it was dark and they were breathing together that night, she let herself think about how it might be to have a man of her own—one she wanted—to lie with every night. She hadn’t wanted that before, but under the darkness of that night the thought was as exciting as it was terrifying.

In the weeks after she’d met him, though she knew she’d been clear to him, brutally so, perhaps, Leona found herself hoping through the hot, still days. She couldn’t shake the suspicion that something was different. In the golden evenings when the sun pulled colors out of the sky and turned the landscape soft and blue, she scanned the horizon around the manyatta for the telltale clouds of dust a Land Rover would make if it were hurtling up the track toward her.

She hated herself a little more each day when it grew dark without him coming. And she hated him for causing her to hope that he’d ignore the way she’d brushed him off in Narok and come find her, anyway. The multiplying cells inside of her—his baby—had nothing to do with her confusing feelings about the man himself. This was her usual pain: wanting to be seen and loved but being utterly unable to let herself allow it. She accepted being alone, she liked it, but there was the occasional wondering. How would it be to share a life with a man? Maybe with this man? How would it feel to see him and to allow herself to be seen? Each evening when he didn’t appear, she nursed her disappointment by listing the reasons it was better to be alone. She knew them by heart—and she knew that however many items she listed, there was really only one reason: her own fear. This made her hate herself, too.

The dust gathered in her hair and made her itch, but she didn’t go back to Narok to shower. She lived with it, like the Maasai did. She was adjusting, she convinced herself, to the life of an embedded anthropologist. When she really understood she was pregnant, and it was long after she could do anything about it, she felt too paralyzed to make the effort to find out who the man was, exactly, and to let him know. She couldn’t imagine the conversation they’d have to have, or the decisions they’d have to make. It was too much. She told herself over and over again that she didn’t want a relationship, she preferred being in a place where everyone was different from her, where she could restrict her interactions and be just an observer. The man—the baby’s father—wouldn’t allow her to limit herself. He would require more than she felt she knew how to give. More than she wanted to give. Intimacy was a risky thing.

Now, here he was.

A Maasai woman, squatting in the shadows by the low embers of the fire pit, reached out and handed him a chipped enamel cup of chai. He took it and thanked her in Maa. He looked perfectly relaxed, happy even, to be there. Leona was grateful Simi had gone to the river; surely she would have noticed Leona’s discomfort. Surely she would have fit the pieces of the puzzle together. And what then? Leona felt a sudden anger burn in her chest—here was another man who walked in without permission, who settled in her space with no regard to whether she wanted him there or not.

“Were you going to tell me?” the baby’s father asked now.

Leona shut her eyes tightly. She answered in Maa.

“Go away. It’s not your child.”

“That’s bullshit, and we both know it.” He paused, then spoke so quietly Leona could barely hear him. “I didn’t have a good father myself, but I think I’d like to try to be one.” His voice cracked slightly. “Whether or not you want me in your life, the girl deserves a father in hers.”

“You had a shitty father? Well, so did I,” she said. “What makes you think you’d do a better job?”

She saw the man wince. His expression hardened. She knew she’d hit a nerve—she’d hurt him. She wasn’t happy about that, but she sensed a shift in his attitude and felt relief. If she had to hurt him in order to get him to leave her alone, so be it.

To her surprise, he spoke again. “Give me a chance to be a better father than mine, or yours, apparently.”

She felt hemmed in, strangled. Why wouldn’t he just go? Like a trapped animal, she bit hard. “A father is the last thing this baby needs. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to know, because I don’t want her to suffer through a terrible childhood like I did. You’re not going to change my mind.”

* * *

Leona grew up watching the rain fall on the green, green grass in the yard of her parents’ home in Beaverton, Oregon. Her father was a surgeon—never around during the day—and her mother was only a shadowy presence, less a mother than a waft of perfume in another room, always on the way out, always saying goodbye. Leona was left home with a housekeeper who lazily vacuumed the Persian rugs and huddled on the back deck in her blue uniform smoking secret cigarettes and blowing rings into the wet sky. Leona had no siblings, and was never encouraged to bring friends home or to go to parties, so she was ignored at school. Not bullied, not sought after, but invisible.

If she were ever asked to sum up her childhood in one word, she would have said silent. Silence was forced on her. Her father’s infrequent presence was a dark thing, covered by night and a sleeping house. The crack of her bedroom door opening and the memory of rough skin pressed against Leona’s cheek, the dank smell of his breath and his wet lips hissing in her ear, “Don’t tell your mother. Don’t say anything to anyone. You’ll ruin it...you’ll ruin me.” Those nights Leona bit her soft inner cheeks bloody and raw to keep from making a sound.

Only once did she try to break the silence with her mother. Her father always left the house early, and at breakfast one day Leona unlocked her voice. Her mother smiled at her over her toast, and Leona whispered a phrase she’d chosen carefully, the canary in the mine. “Dad came into my room last night.” The coffee bubbled loudly in the percolator, and Leona found that forever after, the sound made her anxious.

Her mother’s pause lasted a lifetime. Leona dragged her fork through the egg yolks on her plate, afraid to look up.

“Your father is under a lot of pressure at work,” her mother finally answered, and when Leona glanced up to explain what she meant, to spill it all out like a liquid from a broken bottle, she caught her mother’s eye. There was a tiny flicker there, a lit candle, and then the curtain snapped tightly shut over it. A shutter firmly closed against a possible storm.

After that, Leona kept the secret locked away from everything else. In the daytime she sat through classes at school, concentrating hard, always finding the correct answer. In the evenings, she sat at the kitchen table doing homework while the maid ironed. Her mother came and went, came and went, off to Ladies Auxiliary meetings or the Junior League. Leona’s insides turned to stone, but she never wondered if her mother noticed that her father couldn’t look Leona in the eyes.

The invisibility—the pressure not to speak—became a habit. It saw her through high school and college and, later, through her doctoral program in sociocultural anthropology. Leona grew a jagged space—a broken section deep inside. She learned that people, especially the ones closest to her, weren’t to be trusted.

She declared a major in anthropology because she felt she’d never learned to understand humans; her childhood had given her no great notion of how her own species worked. She was desperate to go as far away from her parents as she could. Leona wrote with skill and conviction and her Fulbright application was chosen. Three months later she was ensconced in a bathroom-sized mud-and-cow-dung inkajijik, in a manyatta filled with identical inkajijiks. They all circled the central livestock corral and were protected from lions and elephants by thorny acacia branches piled in a ring around the whole cluster. In the rare letters to her parents, Leona referred to her new home as a “gated community.”

Dusty and crowded, the manyatta was noisy with the grunting of livestock that lived inside the circle of thorny branches, and the sounds of hyenas, wildebeests and the occasional lion from outside. The small door to her hut was open—as they all were—and she loved the voices she could hear almost always, even brighter in the night, from the tiny huts all around her. She loved the constant scent of other humans and the way the livestock made the air smell tangy. It surprised her at first that she even loved the lack of physical space in the Maasai culture and how a child climbed into her lap every time she sat down and how the other women included her without question in their daily lives. For the first time she felt seen. Eventually she realized her comfort came from the fact that she was foreign. The language barrier and the cultural differences gave her the perfect excuse to feign misunderstanding, to keep people at a manageable distance—not physically, perhaps, but emotionally. At home she couldn’t hide this way. Her unwillingness to be vulnerable was an obvious thing, a scarlet letter people read as standoffish, odd. Here, her days were filled with sound and the presence of people, and she felt warm in it, relaxed, fully in charge of the depth and frequency of any emotional exchange.

But through everything—the meals she shared with the villagers, the long walks to the spring to collect water in her bucket, the rare rainstorms that saw her side by side with the other women in the village slapping fresh mud and soggy cow dung on the leaky inkajijik roof while rain poured down her back—she remembered the first rule of the anthropologist, Participate Only to Observe, and she held back the one thing she could: herself.

Here in Loita, people expressed curiosity about Leona. Women and children crowded into her little inkajijik to watch her. These women wanted to know about her father and her mother and her old life. It wasn’t lost on Leona that her first experience of bonding with other women was in a language she didn’t speak fluently and in a place half a world away from where she’d come.

She liked the questions the women asked, she liked the way they wanted to know her; it was novel and pleasant. Mostly, she loved that she could pick and choose her answers, and that they could never know what she held back—they couldn’t force intimacy against her will. When she spoke to them about herself, she chose her words like picking fruit from a tree, selecting wisely—concentrating on telling them things that didn’t hurt. She painted a picture of her life up to now that was simple and easy, a life that didn’t make her sad. Mother, Father, school and work. She deflected the conversation when she had to. It was easy to edge away from dangerous memories by changing the subject to the differences between a Maasai home and an American one, or how American people dressed and what they ate. Only Simi pressed. Her curiosity was relentless, and she asked endless questions about life outside the village. Her brief education had given her a rare glimpse into the world, and she drank Leona’s stories like water. Simi was different from the other women. She didn’t loiter by the river gossiping, or tease the other women to make them laugh. She had several books, children’s primers, really, that she’d kept from her days at school. Once she showed them to Leona. She proudly lifted them from a small basket tucked under her bed. She could read, she told Leona proudly—none of the other women in the village could.

After that, Leona selected a couple of novels she’d brought with her—beloved classics. The Call of the Wild was Simi’s favorite. Simi poured over the book. She’d sit under an acacia reading for hours, oblivious to the annoyance of the other women who called her lazy and proud. Her innate intelligence broke down the urge to judge things. She’d ask Leona to explain the words she didn’t understand, like snow. She said she liked the way the dog was in charge, the loyalty he showed. She said she’d never thought that even Americans could be cruel to each other—in Kenya, America was seen as a perfect place where only good things happened.

It suited Leona to be emotionally removed from the commotion around her and to have the freedom to be on the outside looking in. Here, nobody expected any more than that from her. Back home, when another person did something Leona didn’t comprehend, something that hurt or confused her, she felt a terrible sense of bewilderment, of sinking beneath the surface into a place where she couldn’t breathe—the fear of not understanding what she felt she should have understood. Here, that panicked sense was gone. She didn’t want to cross that line, to feel confused and misunderstood without a reason again.

Leona knew that in Maasailand, babies weren’t recognized until they were three months old. Children are loved, but utilized, and the utility is treacherous. She’d seen babies die of disease before they took their first steps; she’d observed death rites for teenagers bitten by snakes, toddlers who fell into cooking fires and the bleeding body of a seven-year-old fatally mauled by a hyena while tending goats outside the village. It was prudent, Leona thought, to hold your children at arm’s length when you lived the hard life of the Maasai. Anything could happen, after all. Life out here was fragile; you had to be tough. This is what she told herself when her baby was born. These were the thoughts in her head. She convinced herself it was good to keep distance between herself and the baby. She wrapped her leaky breasts tightly with a kanga and let another nursing mother in the village feed the baby. She let Simi take the baby to her house to sleep, and she let Simi carry the baby on her back during the walks to the river. This was the line that she drew between herself and her child.

Simi loved the baby. With no children of her own, she was free to adopt a baby who couldn’t, for whatever reason, be cared for by its own mother. Leona knew that Simi was more of a mother to her child than she was. She also knew Simi’s place in the village, as a childless wife, was precarious. She said yes when Simi asked to make it official; she consented to an adoption ceremony—the laiboni slaughtered a ram and both women ate the fat. That was the traditional process. Leona knew, in her own head, that her daughter would never really be Maasai, that she was, by her inherited DNA, privy to the perks of being American, but she felt better in an unexpected way. Her child had two parents now.

The Maasai elders gave the baby her first, sacred, name. The name only used by the parents, nobody else. Nalangu, they whispered to Leona, which meant “from a different tribe.” And that’s what the little pale baby looked like. A different tribe, an alien being that Leona observed; who she watched learn to roll over on a rawhide blanket, who she watched nursing from another woman’s breast, who took her first steps in the red dust and dried dung of the manyatta. Leona watched the baby grow in the same way she watched all the babies of the village grow. She allowed her baby to go to Simi for comfort, and not come to her. She spoke to the baby in English, but she spoke to all the kids in English—their parents wanted them to learn. She convinced herself that nothing was different, that the nine months of her pregnancy never really happened and the terror she had felt through it all was just a bad dream.

At night, though, Leona often woke up sweating and terrified, her nightmares alive in her mind. She dreamed of her baby disappearing into a puff of smoke, or being carried away in the mouth of a lion, the wide tawny shoulders heaving as it leaped over the thorny fence, the shaggy blond mane curling slightly over the cold, yellow, animal eyes. Those nights she’d sit bolt upright and reach over to check for her baby’s presence. The baby was never there. When she was awake, Leona hated the version of herself she saw in the nightmares; it wasn’t the smoke or the lion that caused the frantic heart beating and the suffocating breath, but instead it was the vision of herself, just standing there watching, calmly stirring the chai in her dented enamel cup with her metal spoon, in concentric circles, over and over again, while her child vanished before her eyes. What kind of mother did nothing but watch?

Leona found peace and freedom in concentrating on her work. It was important, not just to her, but to the community. When a Maasai member of parliament gave a speech in Narok, Leona pulled him aside afterward and told him of her work, of her idea to convince the government to allow grazing privileges, at least during droughts. He’d been trying to forward a similar idea and asked Leona to send him her research. This forced Leona to focus more fully on her observations of specifics; current grazing patterns versus the ones the elders had known, old ways of dealing with drought versus the new ones. Leona began to visit other manyattas in the area, gathering observations and stories from the largest sampling she could. Those trips away from her baby didn’t upset either one of them. Nalangu was perfectly content with Simi and her wet nurse; Leona was perfectly content not being a mother.

When Nalangu was one, it came time for her to be given a real name—one that could be said aloud, a name that she would keep. Leona allowed Simi to choose that name, and when the girl’s hair was washed with milk and water, and then shaved, Leona watched, notebook and pen in hand. The new name Simi selected was Adia, gift. Like all the kids in the manyatta, she was the child of everyone—free to eat and sleep with any of the mothers, and so Leona’s connection to Adia remained the same as her connection to all the babies around her; affectionate but removed, seen through a telescope, detailed but remote.

Since Maasai fathers played only a tiny role in the lives of their children, Adia’s lack of one was barely a detail worth considering. By the time Adia turned three, Leona didn’t think much about the girl’s father. She’d succeeded in keeping him away. Leona was relieved, frankly, to let it go.

It was easy for Leona to concentrate on her work with all the mothers available to her daughter. And, because of that, it was easy for the days to slip into months, and even years. Occasionally, Leona drove to Nairobi to meet with her government contact. She provided him with the information she’d gathered, and he began taking it to the halls of parliament. Leona liked her trips to Nairobi. She was beginning to crave a city again, the intellectual stimulation of others like her. And she was finally making a name for herself. Other local anthropologists sought her out; she was becoming known in her field. And she rarely thought of Adia. She knew her daughter was safe in the manyatta under the watchful eyes of Simi and the other women.

During one trip to Nairobi, she was introduced to the head of the anthropology department at the University of Nairobi. He’d requested a meeting, and after they talked awhile, he offered her a position on his staff. Leona was thrilled. Now that she had evidence to support her theory that imposed grazing borders were disproportionately damaging to Maasai communities, she could take that to the lecture halls. She could talk to students about the way their own society was changing, and maybe help inspire a new generation of people committed to the work of helping nomadic people.

Leona thought of her daughter and considered her choices. She could mother the girl alone in Nairobi without the benefit of the village women. She thought back to the nightmares she’d had early on and how casually her nightmare self watched as the baby vanished. What an unsuitable mother she was. It occurred to her that she could leave Adia in the manyatta and come to Nairobi by herself. The manyatta was Adia’s home, after all, and she had Simi.

Leona harbored a smoky vision of Adia as a teenager, bent over books in a real high school. That vision, she understood, would require her involvement as a mother. But that was a distant problem. Adia was too young for school, and she’d be safe and happy in the manyatta, at least for a while. She was barely three—far too young for Leona to have to worry about educating her.

The thought niggled at her mind and made her heart beat fast in her chest. She told the department head she needed time to think, to tie up a few loose ends in her research, but she knew her decision was made. The whole drive back to Loita she imagined the way it would feel to teach, to make more contacts in the higher realms of Kenyan government. She could feel excitement in her blood. She could do this; she could use her work, her skills, to help the people she’d come to love so much she’d practically given them her firstborn child.

She stopped for gas a few hours’ drive from the manyatta, and, on a whim, decided not to wait. Leona liked to be resolute after making a decision. While the attendant washed the windshield, Leona asked to use the phone. The connection was fuzzy and unclear, but the department head understood. She accepted the position. She’d move to Nairobi soon. The new semester was only a few weeks away, and as she drove the final miles to the place she’d called home for over four years, Leona listed the things she’d need in her new life: a place to live in the city, clothes to wear for teaching (her old, torn jeans and cotton blouses wouldn’t do); a bank account; an office with a decent computer. These thoughts distracted her as she rolled to a stop outside the manyatta enclosure. She registered the presence of more people than usual milling around but didn’t think about why they might be there. Her mind was full of other thoughts. In her inkajijik, Leona looked around. She’d probably leave most everything here. Simi could use it, and Adia. Absently, Leona reached for a small pile of mail someone—Simi probably—left on her bed. The mail came from Nairobi via Narok, and then to a shop that doubled as a post office nearer the manyatta. Usually, when she received mail, the shopkeeper would send his son to deliver it to her directly. This mail must have come while she was away.

When Leona wrote to her parents, she selected her words carefully. She didn’t keep Adia a secret, but she didn’t write much about her, either. In the letters, she explained only that the father was not present and that the baby—a girl—was happy and safe. As Adia grew, the letters Leona received from her parents became insistent. They’d started a bank account for the girl; they’d rewritten their will. Her father, in particular, couldn’t imagine life in the manyatta. He couldn’t stomach the idea of his only grandchild—a little girl, for that matter—growing up in the dirt, as he said, without the civility of nearby doctors and things like electricity and running water. Leona forced herself to open all of the letters and to read them. But each time a fat, white envelope—half covered with stamps—appeared in the manyatta, she felt her breath quicken and saw sparks of light behind her eyes. She felt she was sinking. She wondered why she’d bothered to tell them about Adia in the first place.

When she read the letters they wrote to her, the pain of her childhood came back like the feeling of a phantom limb, or the flashes of her remembered nightmares. But something surprised Leona, too. Underneath the anger she had for her parents, and the resentment, she fought an unexpected jealousy. The idea of her parents showing concern for Adia when they had never shown much for her was a notion that cut her. She planned to never let them meet her child. She planned to never go back to the wet silence of those Oregon skies or to the dead feeling of being alone in a house with only the ticking of clocks and the hum of the refrigerator to remind her she was alive.

“And who is the father?” this most recent letter asked. “You must know. If nothing else, a girl deserves a father.” It was this that forced a crack in Leona’s long-held conviction about keeping a distance from the white Kenyan. The cruel joke that her own father—simultaneously brutal and absent—should imply that his granddaughter needed something he’d never given Leona sent a shiver up into a hidden spot in her brain. She pushed the thought away and tried to bury it. She told herself that Simi and the village were all Adia needed, at least for now. And yet the thought grew in her mind.

Her father, her parents, made Leona what she was—silent and isolated. During the torturous moments when the worry couldn’t be pushed away, Leona wondered if she was giving her own daughter the same relationship her parents had given her—disconnected and cool. She hated the idea of that, and the guilt it filled her with, but she didn’t know how to be different. Knowing she’d fail was why she’d never wanted to be anyone’s mother in the first place. She was torn. When she watched Adia with the Maasai children, laughing and playing games, never alone and never silent, she was happy. Adia always had Simi. Leona told herself that Adia’s childhood was better than her own. Adia would grow up with age-mates and friends, and the constant activity and watchful eyes of the entire village. It helped Leona to realize that, if her daughter grew up here, she would be nothing like she herself was. Leona tried to convince herself that giving her child a community, a feeling of belonging somewhere, was far more important than giving Adia herself as a mother.

This most recent letter, the one Leona read now after accepting the position at the university, was no different from the others. Leona crumpled it into the tiniest ball she could, tossed it in the fire pit, and went to find Simi.

As she stepped through her doorway and into the light, she noticed again the number of people in the manyatta. There was the laiboni, the spiritual leader, surrounded by the young moran, warriors, in the central area between the small houses. Newly initiated warriors crowded the manyatta. Their faces and their long braids were slicked with a mixture of bright red dirt and sheep fat. It made Leona feel light-headed when she realized that in the faces of these brand-new men—most only thirteen or fourteen—she recognized the rounded faces of little boys she’d first met four years ago. Now they were men. She’d been here for so long. She hadn’t considered how it would hurt to leave them all behind. To leave Simi. The thought made her feel dizzy, and she wandered over to sit with the elders in the shade of a scraggly acacia tree.

“What’s happening?” she asked one wizened woman.

“Emurata,” the woman answered.

When Leona first came to the manyatta, she forced herself to watch everything, all the rituals and ceremonies. Her work was to observe, without emotion, the daily life and events that reflected the beliefs of the people she wrote about. Her least favorite ritual was the girls’ coming-of-age rite, the emurata. She found it impossible not to wince at the cutting of the flesh, and she found herself unable to keep from feeling a harsh judgment against the entire idea. Her resolve to observe everything without critique was tested every time she was audience to an emurata. After watching three of them, she convinced herself she had all the information she needed about the practice and stopped going to the ceremonies at all.

The ceremony had started and the moran began to dance. They stood in a circle, impossibly tall and impossibly thin, backs as straight as the spears they held. When they began their singing, they chanted uh-uh-uh-uuuu-huh and the straight-bodied jumping made their braids slap against their backs and the iron of their spear tips glisten in the sun—Leona knew the circumcision was about to start. She stood up and walked past the dancing moran. She wanted to be outside the village, far enough away so that the wind in the acacia trees would fill her ears instead of the sound of the rites.

Vaguely, as she made her way through the crowd, she glanced around for Adia. It was rare that she was alone with the girl, but she wanted that now. It occurred to her she would miss the daily interaction—as unsubstantial as it was—with her daughter. A tingle of worry nibbled at her from somewhere deep and hidden. Her parents’ letter, the guilt it made her feel, pressed into her mind. She wanted to hurry, but she was caught between the desire to leave and the unfamiliar feeling of maternal responsibility leaking through her. Where was Adia?

Leona could tell the instant the knife met flesh by the sound of the deep-throated cry of the girl that rose from the squat dung-and-wattle structure and hovered in the air. An image flashed into Leona’s mind of Adia, sprawled and bleeding. It couldn’t be her, Leona knew. At three, Adia was far too young, but the image of her daughter being cut, now or years from now, set Leona’s heart pounding. Someday Adia would be thirteen. Someday, if Leona did leave her here, Adia would think of the cutting as normal, as necessary. This would be her world. Maybe her father was right. The idea of giving him credit for parenting advice made Leona sick, but she couldn’t ignore it. This was her daughter, after all. And then some tiny, unwelcome shoot of a poison plant took root in her mind—a thought she didn’t want to think. As much as she hated them, there was a part of Leona that desperately wanted her parents’ approval. They were happy to have a grandchild. It was the first thing Leona had done to inspire their pride.