The Monday after the museum exhibition arrived with its usual Nairobi buzz—matatus honking along University Way, street vendors hawking roasted maize, students hurrying across campus with books clutched to their chests. But to Julius Alexander, or Ochieng Gamu, as the voice of his childhood still muttered to him, the world had another beat.
He was not over thinking of Maria Fernandes since he met her at the museum. He could still hear her laugh, and the manner in which she had listened--she had really listened--when he had talked of Busia. It was hard to be listened to in such a manner, without any feeling of judgment or degradation. He questioned whether the destiny had given the rendezvous, or whether it were the spirit of some of their forefathers.
One afternoon, when he was leaving a lecture on African oral traditions, he saw her outside the main library of the university. She was sitting on low stone steps under a jacaranda tree with the purple flowers floating around her like fallen stars. She was drawing once more, and, so engrossed was she that she did not see him coming.
"Are you always drawing?" Julius asked, smiling.
Maria raised her eyes, and her eyes gleamed in recognition. And you are ever coming where I least expect.
He chuckled. Perhaps it is the city which is small, and not I am after you.
She stroked the step next her. "Sit, Ochieng Gamu."
He dropped down on the rock and his bag fell down his arm. Her drawing book was open on a drawing of the facade of the library, which she had embellished with images of students in brightly coloured costumes -kitenge skirts, headscarves, even the shabby matatus standing outside the gate.
You see not just buildings, Julius saw.
"I see stories," Maria replied. "Every detail has a soul. Like your nickname—Gamu. It is not just a name. It is a story."
Julius changed his position, a bit embarrassed. No one in my village gives a name carelessly. They carry history. Occasionally they even possess prophecy.
What is Julius Alexander bearing? she said, as it were.
He stared in the direction of the lecture hall where other students were pouring out. "Responsibility. According to my dad, I need to bring Lwanya wherever I go. This is what I study anthropology to understand the origins of our origin, and where we may be heading.
Maria listened and her pen was between her fingers. This is not the case in Lisbon. Human beings are proud, and yes, they lose their source. They are futuristic and pursue jobs, technology, progress. I discovered that roots are not irrelevant when I came here.
He turned to her. "And what do you carry, Maria?"
She paused, and told him, a question. Will I fit into two worlds simultaneously, my European and the African one that I am exploring? Or must I always feel divided?"
The petals of the jacaranda fluttered about them a bit. Her words seemed to Julius to have some peculiar kinship with him. He had always been ambivalent, also, between the soil and the concrete of Nairobi and Lwanya.
They sat quietly interrupted by some chatter of other students. At length Maria shut her drawing-book. "Will you show me your campus? Not the tourist version, the one of yours.
He smiled, pleased. "Come."
They walked over the green grass, through lecture halls with posters on debates, poetry slams, and student elections on the walls. Julius mentioned his favorite section of the library where he would hide and read novels by Ngugi wa Thiong and Achebe. He took her to the little canteen where chapati was being fried fresh, the odor of it filling the air right at noon.
They stood by the sports ground and watched a lot of laughing students playing football barefoot and the laughter increased with every goal missed. Maria applauded as somebody scored and Julius laughed at her excitement.
"Do you play?" she asked.
"Not well," Julius admitted. However, in Lwanya, all boys are raised to play with a ball, sometimes only plastic bags strung on a piece of string. It is our first education."
Her eyes softened. "I'd like to see Lwanya someday."
The phrases startled him. No foreigner had ever talked of his village so earnestly. Some day, I said, perhaps. "It is not Lisbon. There are no tall buildings. Just fields, rivers, people who time by the sun."
This is the very reason why I would like to see it, Maria said.
In the evening, when the campus was quiet and settled, they were back under the jacaranda tree. Julius explained to her how his grandmother used to tell about the ghosts that watched over rivers, how men were made by going through initiation where they were kept silent and in pain. Maria was listening, wide-eyed, and telling her own stories, of Lisbon with its paved streets, of Fado music in taverns, of the Atlantic waves breaking on the Portuguese cliffs.
It was like a meeting between two maps, one African, one European.
The call of prayer echoed in one of the neighbouring mosques as the muezzin called upon his faithful to their prayers as the dusk fell. Maria stood reluctantly. I have to go back to my host family. They will wonder where I am."
Julius also arose, shaking dust off his trousers. "Thank you for today."
No, thanks, said she with a slight smile. "For showing me your world."
She tore something out of a piece of her sketchbook before she went, and gave it to him. Her phone number in fine, neat handwriting.
"Call me," she said.
and in a moment she disappeared, strolling off into the evening shadows, her linen dress in the setting sun. Julius stood motionless, with the paper in his hand as a relic. His heart was racing not under the ascending steps of the campus but under the prospect that was opening before him.
He glanced up at the jacaranda tree above, with its flowers in the dusk faintly shining. Julius felt like Nairobi was not entirely a city of strangers, as it was the first time he had returned to the city after leaving Lwanya. What might have been the start of something bigger--something that was to be between Busia and Lisbon, between soil and sea, between memory and dream.
And though he yet not called it by name, he knew it was worth pursuit.