The Secret

Some rivers carry more than water.

Nyapol couldn’t quite remember when the attraction began. Things just changed, like the river’s current, overnight.

Jared wasn’t her type, but he grew on her.

She had long given up on her husband, Ochola. He lured her out of her aunt’s home when she was barely out of her teens and she followed her heart. The first years were exciting but when he moved to Nairobi for work and left her heavy with child, in the village, their relationship changed. For the first two years, after the birth of their first and second born, he returned regularly. Then the stretches grew longer. He would show up in December, high through the whole Christmas season, then race back to Nairobi as soon as the year broke.

She had remained loyal through it all, patient even though she knew there were others. With Ochola, there were always others. He was community property. His appetite was well known.

Jared was his complete contrast. He wasn’t ugly but there was nothing about him that she originally found attractive. In fact in the beginning she found him quite unmanly and strange that at his age, as a senior bachelor, he had never married, nor had children.

His elderly mother, who doted over him even though he was a man in his 40s, was the one who asked her to clean his house, once a week. For three months Nyapol cleaned without ever meeting him. She would clean every Wednesday and he would arrive on the weekends.

The first time she was in close quarters with him, she found him awkward. He was painfully shy and when he spoke to her, it was in Kiswahili of the city. But he had one redeeming factor that she noticed right away. His voice. He spoke so well, clearly and deliberately. A quiet confidence that didn’t need to be loud. He also treated her with respect and didn’t behave like a boss. That, she liked.

At first the money would be sent through his mother then he started paying her directly, twice what his mother offered. He was fair, kind and always sent the money to her Mpesa account on time. His generosity, his reliability, his kindness. That is what won her over. Not that she had ever named it that way herself.

They lived in separate worlds that even when he started flirting she didn’t pay it any mind.

It started like a joke. He asked one day what her name was. When she told him Nyapol, he asked again — what’s your baptismal name? She told him Rael. From then on whenever she arrived to clean, he would call her by her maiden name and it made her feel something. Seen. Completely seen.

That is when she started to notice how he looked at her. A woman always knows when she is noticed. She also noticed that he was in the village more often, spending sometimes two straight weeks in a month. He claimed he had to look after his ageing mother but they had a business-like arrangement. She made requests and demands that he fulfilled. He paid the bills and she cooked the food. Soon she started to suspect she had something to do with his recurring presence.

Jared rarely left the house, or interacted with the villagers. He didn’t really have friends, and the only people who visited him were the fundis, who were constantly fixing something in the home at his mother’s insistence. When he left it was in his car, to Kisumu or wherever it is that he went. He was a private man and so it was surprising how gradually he opened up to her and started treating her like a confidant especially when his mother was overly fussy.

There was fondness in how he greeted her in private. When the rest of the family or relatives were around, he was formal and aloof. But in the close encounters, when they were unobserved, he was gentle in his requests, in particular after he started by calling her by her name.

One day out of the blue, he asked her, “Rael, do you know you are beautiful?” and she didn’t know what to do with that compliment. Ochola had used that line to lure her and it was something that she stopped responding to. Her beauty had only been a curse and she was no longer that naive girl fresh out of school. Words are what men used when they wanted something and all men wanted something of her, eventually.

But she knew something had changed in their association when her daughters started calling him uncle. If Ochola was absent, Jared was present, in their lives without even trying. The regular income steadied the lives of her children and for the first time, there was some predictability.

The incident happened two years after she had become his regular housekeeper. At least once every three weeks, Nyapol would take the laundry to the river. To wash his sheets because his mother had this habit of locking his rain water storage tank with a padlock to conserve water for her son while he was away. The river was her idea and over the months, Nyapol had become accustomed to doing all the bulk laundry by the river.

The river was calm as it was at this time of the year. She was washing the sheets, lost in her thoughts, thinking about a school trip scheduled for her eldest daughter the following week. Then her thoughts returned to the sheets and she felt the material and remembered Jared’s mother saying where she had sourced them. One day she would also go to Eastleigh in Nairobi and buy some nice things for herself. She had finished washing all the bedsheets and had begun rinsing them when she looked up to see Jared approaching.

She thought he had misplaced something and wanted some information. But when arrived, he just sat on the grass by the river bank and started talking mostly to himself as she scrubbed the sheets against the flat rock surface.

His mother had been away that week, she had gone to Nairobi for her medical check up and normally he would stay with her until her rounds were done but this time he had not accompanied her. Clearly the village had grown on him. He was a lot more relaxed and not so hurried. She found herself participating in the conversation and began to enjoy his company and for the first time, she asked him some questions about his work and about the places he traveled to.

She had not intended to linger but the conversation just flowed effortlessly and her discomfort disappeared. Then, he began to help her, fetching water with the pail from the river and when he saw her struggling to wring the bedsheets, he offered to hold the other side firmly in a way that she could not refuse. It was while they were wringing the second sheet that she noticed a shift in his manner.

The sheet now hung between them, heavy and dripping, and he locked his gaze on her. She could see what was in those eyes and she knew what he wanted. When he brought his end to her, she did not step back. She just placed it in the basin and turned to pick up the next bed sheet. That is when he moved behind her and held his body close to hers. She kept her hands in the plastic basin of water, rinsing the pillow covers, her back bent to him wondering what he would do next.

His boldness surprised her. His hands found her waist and he just rested them there as if asking for permission to proceed. She felt no urge to resist his advance. Then he asked that question again, the one he had asked months ago,

“Rael, do you know you are beautiful?”

And kissed the nape of her neck. She felt a jolt flash through her body. He did it again and this time she turned around and faced him, “What are you doing?” and he moved even closer and lightly kissed her chin and her ear lobes.

“What are you doing?’ she asked again and he only tightened his grip around her waist and she felt his firmness.

He knew what he was doing, teasing her but how he knew, she couldn’t fathom. His look was intense. She turned away and faced the river and he took it as an invitation and now he had both arms around her waist, moving one ever slowly towards her breast. He was in no hurry, and he moved like a man who had all the time in the world. His lips returned to the nape of her neck and she felt his mouth trace the length of her spine through the thin fabric of her dress until somewhere just above her tailbone. Her body was responding even though her hands pretended to be still busy, scrubbing the pillow cases absent mindedly. She felt the sensation of the cold, dirty brown coloured river water and the heat of his breath occupying her body simultaneously.

Rael, do you know you are beautiful?

The way he said it. Not Nyapol. Rael. The name he had given her. The name that belonged to this version of herself that existed only in his compound, in his presence, in the hour she kept for herself without calling it that.

She closed her eyes.

She could only hear the rumble of the river and it was soothing. When his fingers found the soft flesh of her hip, her breath hitched, making a small strangled sound that she did not recognise. The pretense of scrubbing the pillowcases fell away. She straightened, not by choice but because her spine had softened, and she allowed herself to lean back on the solid warmth of him. He was touching her body in places that she had forgotten were sensitive, causing her skin to tingle as his fingers brought to life all her neglected parts.

She could not remember ever being touched like this, or the last time someone had paid this much attention to her body. Ochola was the only man she had ever been with and all he was ever interested in was penetration. Jared wasn’t in a hurry which she found baffling because they were not even well hidden. Anyone could appear from across the river and spot them. She scanned the opposite bank and spotted bright yellow weaver birds, flitting around tall reeds standing in the water like a curtain. Hanging from those reeds were brown rounded nests. The weaver birds were flying back and forth to the nests with an urgency that Jared lacked.

His gentle fingers began gliding up and down her body and his warm lips stirred her up. She pressed against him and he tightened the grip around her waist, his finger still tracing her parts through the dress fabric and his mouth never leaving the nape of her neck. And his voice, that polished voice.

“Rael, do you know you are beautiful?”

And she felt it in the same place his hands were, her body responding to every touch, urging him to explore, go further, Don’t stop! He had started bunching her dress, lifting it up so gently, that her thighs began to shiver.

Her hands left the basin of water and for the first time she touched him reaching back, she found his hip and pulled, pressing herself behind against him. She had him grasp and she closed her eyes again. She could feel his heat.

And then he stopped. She felt his rigidity before she understood it. He had frozen, his hands were no longer moving and his breath inaudible.

She opened her eyes. There was something in the river, moving with the current, unhurried, on its own mission. It was a shape she understood before her mind registered what she was seeing.

The face was hidden and partly submerged in water, the clothes a pale white shirt and dark trousers spread on the water like a parachute holding onto a weight. It was a corpse moving past them. Past the bed sheets on the rocks, past the plastic basin, and past the place where she had knelt every three weeks for two years with her hands in the water.

It moved through the gentle stream and then tumbled into the rapids where the river took a bend and disappeared out of sight, downstream. The corpse was gone and the flow of the river once again filled the silence.

Nyapol’s dress was still bunched at her hip. She did not pull it down immediately. Her body had not yet received the instruction.

Jared had stepped back. She could feel the distance between them before she turned to confirm it.

She turned.

He was looking at the water where the corpse had been. His face was the face of a man who had just been shown something he could not unsee. The weaver birds and their nest were still there and they now sounded like they were making a ruckus.

She pulled her dress down.

She picked up the basin, loaded the sheets and placed it on top of her head and began her walk to the compound.

Neither of them spoke. Nor did they tell anyone what they had seen.

Everything changed after that incident. He started avoiding her, keeping away on the days she cleaned his house.

Then he just disappeared, like Ochola, back to Nairobi, doing busy work, his mother said. The housekeeping continued, the pay was always prompt but there was no more Rael.

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