What Tears Us Apart Read online

  As doubt clogged her throat, Leda felt sure she would drown in the smell. Moldy cabbage, rotten fish, cooking smoke, but mostly it was the steaming scent of human waste that poured into Leda’s nose and mouth, saturating her as if she could never be free of that smell again. She opened her mouth to breathe, and gagged on the sweat that dribbled in.

  Now the view of the slum had disappeared and they were inside it, weaving through narrow spaces and crisscrossed paths like an ant farm in hyperdrive.

  Men with hollowed cheeks and yellowed eyes stared at Leda. Women—in the midst of tending children and selling and trading and gossiping and cooking and cleaning—their eyes flickered warily as she passed.

  The children, however, were a different story. Schoolkids flew up around Leda like clouds of sparrows, waving their arms and chirping Howareyou? Howareyou?

  Leda was grateful to them for their acceptance and she answered with the Swahili words she’d only ever spoken to her iPod. “Jambo,” she said, and they giggled.

  “Present,” one boy shouted amiably.

  Samuel stopped suddenly, and motioned for Leda to stand beside him. He shooed away the children, not meanly but firmly, and set down the suitcase, ready, Leda supposed, to continue with the tour he’d begun when they met that morning in the café in Nairobi.

  “So, you are here to volunteer. What is it you do in America? Are you a teacher?”

  Avoiding his question, Leda looked away. “Yes, I’m a volunteer. Here to help.”

  Samuel nodded. “Do not give the children money. They do not understand it. In your country maybe you are a poor teacher, but here your money is a lot. This puts ideas in the children’s heads.”

  Leda looked into Samuel’s face, at the sheets of sweat soaking his T-shirt. She moved closer and released the handle on the suitcase, demonstrating that she would pull it.

  Samuel smiled again, the smile Leda hated and that she felt hated her. She nodded toward the children playing nearby. “What ideas?”

  “The idea that begging is a job. Or that robbing you would not be so bad since you give it so easily.”

  Samuel took a breath and walked a few steps. Now he resumed his script as he pointed here and there. “When the British left, they gave this land to the Nubians—Muslim Sudanese soldiers. But with no deeds. The Nubians became illegal landlords and the seeds of war were planted in this dirt. Muslim against Christian. Kikuyu against Luo. There have been many problems.”

  “But then, technically, the government owns the land? They could help.”

  They passed a beauty salon of women who stared at Leda struggling to wheel her suitcase through the trash. Samuel waited. Silently, he watched the trash pool around the suitcase wheels until Leda found herself dragging, not wheeling, the suitcase. His look more or less said I told you so.

  “Yes, they could help,” Samuel said. “But it is more convenient for them to do nothing. As long as the slum is illegal, they do not have to provide what the city people have rights to.”

  A man tripped over Leda then, for cosmic emphasis, sloshing water from a yellow jug. The dirt beneath her shoes turned to mud and the man looked at it and frowned. Leda’s skin burned under the man’s indignation. He huffed and walked on. How far had the man walked for that water? “Then how do they get the necessities?”

  “Everything is for sale in Kibera. Water. Use of the latrine. A shower. People pay the person who steals electricity for them. They pay the watchmen, really paying them not to rob them. They pay thieves to steal back what other thieves stole in the night. Women who sell changaa, they pay the police a bribe. Women who sell themselves, they pay the bribes with their bodies. But still one must pay for charcoal and food and school. The hardest thing to justify is school.”

  “How do people pay for everything?”

  “They don’t.” Samuel pointed at the ground.

  Leda lifted her right foot and a sticky plastic bag dangled from it in the dusty air. She considered anew the blanket of trash bags.

  “When you can’t pay or it’s unsafe to go, then you do your business in a bag and—” Samuel’s hand carved an arc through the air that ended at her shoe. “Flying toilets.” He took the suitcase, now soiled from her dragging it through the refuse.

  “We’re almost there.” He pointed ahead.

  Leda was in shock. But before they moved on, she had to ask a question she thought she knew the answer to. “Do you live in Kibera, Samuel?”

  It was the first time emotion crossed his face unfettered. “Yes,” he said, and heaved the suitcase onto his back as he turned away, a turtle putting his shell back on.

  Leda followed him deeper into the slum, supplementing his practiced explanations about Kibera with the rushing things her eyes and ears told her. Kibera was an assault of objects, colors, smells and sounds, all suddenly appearing out of the dust inches from her face. As they ducked between mud/stick structures, colored laundry fluttered and dripped overhead. A volley of muffled chatter and music echoed from all directions.

  Leda wondered what privacy meant in Kibera, if anything. How would any one of these people feel if they found themselves alone in a quiet house like the one she shared with Amadeus? Or in a mansion of marble, glass and sky, like her mother’s? So much space all to themselves.

  People passed each other the way cats do, touching, brushing skin, sliding off one another in the sweaty heat. Personal space was an oxymoron and as soon as Leda put words to the thought it made her recoil, dodging this way and that to avoid contact in the swarming crowds. She saw she would have to form new habits in Kibera, new ways of moving through space.

  Women streamed by in bright dresses, in business attire, in jeans and flip-flops. Men streamed past in athletic jerseys and ragged South Park T-shirts and button-downs. All on a mission, edging doggedly in one direction or the other.

  Chickens and stray dogs darted through the two-way parade with a bravado Leda wanted to admire. But the smoke searing her eyes and the jagged rays of sunlight darting through the metal turned the path ahead, behind the bobbing suitcase, into an obstacle course of certain peril.

  Eventually, the suitcase stopped.

  It dropped to the ground and revealed Samuel heaving to catch his breath so he could announce the obvious.

  “We’re here,” he said, and pointed at a small, hand-painted sign tacked to a towering wall of corrugated metal. Triumph Orphanage.

  Most of the maze of houses and shops were single-roomed, and could be seen right into if the bedsheet doors weren’t drawn. But they’d passed several tall metal partitions, walled-off spaces, which the orphanage seemed to have, as well. Leda tried to get a sense of how big the structure was and poked her head around the corner.

  The metal wall spoke to her. Rather, it laughed.

  The hair on Leda’s arms stood up. The laugh was a sound like midnight thunder rolling across the sea. Leda shut her eyes. From the moment she’d entered Kibera with Samuel, winding through the dust, through the throngs of smiling children and scowling mothers, through the smells and jolting clamor, whenever it seemed too much to bear, Leda had blinked her eyes long enough to see the smile from the website. A smile full of calm and certainty.

  Leda would bet her soul that the laugh on the other side of that wall and the smile were one and the same.

  When Samuel banged on the door with his fist, the laugh snuffed out. Leda’s eyes shot open.

  A section of the metal wall slid open.

  And there it was—the smile that belonged to the laugh.

  “Leda,” the smile said, wide and shining.

  “Ita,” she said, feeling the grin tug at her lips, a sensation as rare as it was delicious. For once, she wasn’t politely mimicking—the smile sprang from inside, as though freed from a cage.

  Samuel looked back and forth with a curious expression. “Have you met before?”

  Ita smiled wider, shaking his head. “We have now.”

  Leda laughed, enchanted by the simple confidence he ra
diated like a lightbulb. Feeling breathless, she looked down at her dusty feet and had another vision of standing by the sea—watching in wonder as the sand, the shells, her whole body was drawn in by the tide, magically pulled by the moon. Leda looked up and took another gulp of seeing Ita’s lit-up face. Then she turned to Samuel and held out her hand. “Thank you, Samuel. I wish you well.”

  Samuel snapped free of the moment and nodded. “Good luck, Leda. Good luck in Kibera.”

  Ita held out his hand, too. “Samuel. Asante sana.”

  Samuel shook Ita’s hand, craning to peek inside the orphanage with the same urgent curiosity Leda felt. Ita stood firm with his smile, blocking the view. Samuel nodded once more. “Karibu. Kwaheri.”

  Leda watched her guide disappear around a corner and then turned back, which left her and Ita alone across the divide of the entrance. She found herself close enough to be struck by the smoothness of his skin. It was flawless, reminding Leda of a hand-dipped cone. Imagining that it would feel like velvet to the touch, Leda lurched forward for her suitcase handle, letting her hair swish over her face.

  “Please, let me help you,” Ita said. He took the suitcase from her and swung it through the doorway in one fell swoop, opening a new world to Leda. The orphanage.

  Leda got a two-second glimpse at a horseshoe of shadowy rooms around a dirt courtyard, before the view filled with children, bumping like bees as they swarmed past Ita to greet her. Six boys, Leda counted—toddler to preteen—as they tugged her inside, chattering competitively in Swahili. One boy, the oldest, watched her intently, walking backward like a guard dog. Leda tried to smile at him.

  Inside, she stepped into a battle of smells. To the left, cardamom and clove fought pepper and cumin for control of a stew. Leda sniffed the spicy smoke the same way she inhaled Amadeus’s fur after a grooming, but stopped short when she was bitten by Kibera’s sharp endnote of sewage.

  The boys patted her clothes and skin as they tugged her toward a woven mat in the courtyard. Leda focused on not tripping over them. She felt woozy after her voyage through Kibera, as if she’d stepped off a merry-go-round. But now, inside the orphanage, if such a thing was possible, it was actually louder, more closed-in, more overwhelming. The kids swirled around her legs like water in a tide pool and Ita followed, the herder.

  “We’ve been waiting for you!” he shouted over the tops of their heads. “They are very excited. We have prepared many things for your arrival.”

  Leda swam in the most human contact she’d had in years. Maybe ever. Estella had renounced her past and whatever family it may have contained, so Leda hadn’t grown up in proximity to anybody other than her mother. She’d sat alone in school, then spent evenings watching children on television, trying to comprehend them in their freeness. Leda always felt as though she’d been born eighty years old.

  Now here she was being mobbed by children, her breathing shallowing. Estella’s judgments rang in her mind—she was not made for this. Was she crazy to have come here?

  And then, just as Leda nearly went down in the mosh pit, Ita saved her. His eyes met hers, a knowing look in them that made Leda feel as if she’d found a wall to lean against. His eyes, dark brown with golden supernovas, stayed locked on Leda as he called out in Swahili to the children. A series of commands, sold with a smile but sure as a sunrise. The children reacted like little soldiers. They took their places on the mat, sitting cross-legged with their hands in their laps.

  Leda exhaled and Ita laughed.

  “We’re happy today. To meet you, Leda.”

  “Oh, me, too,” she rushed out, hoping she hadn’t just come across as rude. “Just tired, I think, from—”

  “A tsunami of children? Yes. Cannot hear yourself think, is that it?”

  Leda nodded, amazed. Yes, that was exactly it. Ita stepped closer. “Lunch is almost ready. Should I show you your new home?”

  She looked around the orphanage, at the concrete walls crumbling to the dirt floors, at the open doorways and one wooden door. Shyly, she followed him as he walked briskly to the left of the courtyard. First, he pointed at a closed door, crooked on its hinges. “My office,” he said, and walked on. Then he turned, with a wink Leda might have imagined, and said, “And my bedroom.” The next room was open and Ita stepped inside, waving her after.

  Leda didn’t understand what she was seeing. A closet? Shoes lined the edges of the room, in a square around another huge woven mat. She lifted her foot to step forward, but Ita put his hand on her arm. It was warm and soft.

  “This is where the children sleep. You may sleep here or—” Ita stepped out of the room “—with Mary.”

  Mary had been the other name on the website, but hadn’t been linked to a picture. Leda’s stomach burned with curiosity. “Is Mary here now?”

  “Who did you think was creating that delicious smell?” Ita ducked his head under a wooden beam and Leda followed him into the kitchen. A wood fireplace formed the rear of the room, and the rest of it, apart from smoke, was filled with pots and pans and plastic bowls towering off the ground.

  Bent over a cauldron that hung above a fire was a sizable woman’s backside, wrapped taut in a patterned sarong, brighter than a bouquet of flowers. At Ita’s voice, the woman straightened and Leda saw she was old, though to guess her actual age would be tricky.

  Leda felt relief gush through her, and she laughed at herself when she realized why. When she’d read the listing online, she had thought perhaps the man and woman mentioned were married or a couple. Now, she knew she’d been hoping that wasn’t the case.

  Did women shake hands? Leda wasn’t sure, so she said, “Hujambo. Habari ya asubuhi,” the words piling up in her mouth like cotton balls.

  Mary smiled kindly, her face wrinkling like a cozy bathrobe. “Karibu,” she said.

  Welcome. Leda did feel welcome. She’d never had anyone make such a fuss over her presence, or anything she did, really. Except maybe Amadeus.

  Next, Ita showed her where the toilet was—toilet being a very loose term. There were two stalls with two hanging sheets. When Ita pulled back the first sheet, Leda’s eyes traveled down to the square of concrete. In the middle was a piece of wood with a handle on it, and Leda could only guess that underneath was a hole. The second stall was exactly the same.

  “Shower,” Ita said of the second stall.

  When Leda remembered to breathe again, she met Ita’s eyes and saw that they gleamed with pride.

  So Leda looked again and tried to see it through different eyes. She remembered how Samuel had said everyone paid to use a latrine and to bathe. This was a luxury. An achievement. He should be proud.

  “Awesome!” Leda said, and knew immediately she’d overdone it.

  But Ita laughed at her effort, not wounded in the least, and led her by the elbow to the other side of the orphanage.

  The ease with which Ita touched her—it was unnerving. Even more distracting was how her skin felt under his fingers—tingly, pliant. Usually, she grew stiff under a stranger’s touch. In her fairly limited sexual experience, Leda had always felt clumsy at best, but more often raw and exposed. But as she walked with Ita, she had a lightning-flash vision of Ita’s warm hands on her skin. She bet it would be different with him—gentler, yet sexier, urgent.

  Leda’s head shot up, her eyes darting to Ita as if he’d heard her thoughts. She felt the blood stampede her cheeks. She coughed to try and combat a full-on blush.

  Ita paused before the back wall of the orphanage. He looked at her strangely, and she wondered if she was hurtling pheromones at him so hard he felt it. Get a grip, Leda.

  “There is a room behind here. It is our medical room, our secret hospital.”

  He must have known how strange that sounded. But at the same time, she noted the same pride as before that lifted his chin. “Are you a doctor?” she asked.

  Ita smiled. But when his eyes moved to the door, his confidence faltered. “No. I study.” Now he looked embarrassed. “Not like you have stu
died. Impressive, your education.” Leda had sent him her résumé, as if applying for a job. Now she felt stupid about it. “I want to know all about it,” he said as he walked past the room.

  On the other side of the orphanage, the back half was a three-walled room with a metal roof and another identical mat spread out. “This is for study, and for eating when the rains come.”

  The next room had a sheet drawn tight across it. “Mary!” Ita called across the courtyard, followed by a question in Swahili that Leda couldn’t understand.

  Mary’s answer boomeranged back and Ita gently tucked the sheet to one side. “Mary’s sleeping space,” Ita said, but respectfully, he didn’t enter.

  Leda hesitated.

  “It is okay. You may look,” Ita said.

  Leda ducked her head inside. This room was much smaller. A mat still covered most of the dirt floor, but this time sported a narrow strip of foam and a folded sheet on one half.

  When Leda poked her head back out, Ita watched her expectantly.

  “It’s...” Leda wasn’t sure what he wanted to hear, and her head was starting to spin with the dawning realization that these were her accommodations for the month. “Great.”

  “So you will stay with Mary,” Ita said, satisfied.

  Leda looked out to where the children sat, playing quietly, waiting for their lunch. She put a hand out, feeling for the wall, something solid.

  Ita’s voice was different when he spoke next, with an edge of self-consciousness that was new. “I’m sure where you live is very different.” He remained with the sheet in his hand and straightened. “The bed might help you become accustomed.”

  Leda realized he meant the piece of foam in the little room, but she could no more imagine stretching out next to Mary and having any hopes of sleeping there for an entire month than she could imagine coping with any of it—the toilet, kitchen, the sheets for doors. She would be surrounded at all times. Forget hearing herself think, she wouldn’t even be able to feel herself breathe. As if in response, her breathing came quicker.