A Dancer In the Dust (16 page)

“So, you came back,” Martine said when I pulled into the dusty yard of her farm a few hours later.

“Of course I came back,” I said.

“Most of the aid workers stay in the capital,” she said with a joking smile. “In those villas along the river, drinking cold beer.”

“You shouldn’t be so hard on them, Martine,” I told her. “They really are here to help.” I handed her the letter Early had given me.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“Something from the president,” I said. “He gave it to my boss, who gave it to me.” I smiled. “I’m just the messenger.”

She opened the letter, read it, then returned it to the envelope.

“I’m being ordered to grow coffee,” she said. “If I do, people will be sent out to teach me how to do it. Since we’re low on water in this region, they say I must use the dry method for processing the beans. Everything required for that method will be supplied to me. All I have to do is use it.”

“Coffee,” I said quietly. “Well, next to oil, it’s the most valuable commodity there is.”

“To the West it is valuable,” Martine said, “but not to me.” She glanced out into the bush. “And not to the Lutusi or anyone else in Tumasi.”

“How do you know it wouldn’t be a good thing to grow coffee in this part of Lubanda?” I asked.

“Coffee has to be processed, Ray,” Martine answered. “A lot of labor is required to plant, to harvest, to remove the cherry from the beans. All of it requires labor. Where do you think that labor will come from? It will come from the Lutusi, who will be forced to produce it.” She shook the letter in the air. “This is the first step in their destruction,” she said. “In the destruction of their world, which is also mine.” She grabbed my hand and pressed the letter into it. “My answer is no.”

Against the force of her determination, I could only stand silent.

“Fareem will want me to do it,” she added, almost to herself. “He says that in the end, they will take my farm. And he may be right.” She gazed out over her fields and for the first time, I saw terror in her eyes. Not apprehension. Not dread. But actual terror.

And so, with a hesitant, almost trembling hand, I touched her bare shoulder, then drew my fingers down and took her hand. She didn’t respond, but she didn’t pull away either, and so for a few luxurious seconds I savored this small intimacy.

Finally, she drew her hand from mine and turned toward me. “Come, let us go sit under the tree. It is cooler there.”

And so we did, the two of us, alone, both more or less silent. I didn’t know how to approach her, and I was afraid to make an argument against her. Caught in that web, I simply lingered for a time, talking of nothing in particular until, on the pretext of needing to write a report, I headed back to Tumasi.

It was the middle of the afternoon when I got back to the village. The market was in full swing, with a large group of nomads strolling among the stalls, buying cloth or jerry jars. The women sometimes folded a swath of brightly colored cotton over their arms or encircled their waists with it. The children played around them, chasing each other, sticks and stones the only toys they needed. The men moved slowly, and with great dignity, carrying their staffs like crosiers, hardly ever touching anything.

“How did it go in Rupala?”

I turned to find Fareem standing beside me.

“Martine will tell you,” I answered.

“Then it’s bad news,” Fareem said.

“The government wants her to grow coffee, Fareem,” I told him. “It’s part of a larger plan, a way of stopping Mafumi.”

“Nothing can stop Mafumi.” His eyes endeavored to betray nothing, yet in their grim sparkle they betrayed the hopelessness he felt. Then he smiled, but with dark irony. “It’s Lubandan Independence Day,” he said. “There’ll be dancing and a bonfire here in Tumasi. A big party. Martine is coming.”

“She should have told me,” I said. “I would have driven her into the village.”

“She prefers to walk,” Fareem said. “You must find that quite ridiculous, but it’s the way she holds herself together. We all have to hold ourselves together, don’t you think, Ray?”

I nodded. “Well, I have a little work to do,” I said, and with that turned away and walked to my office.

I was still at my desk when night fell and the bonfire was lit. I could hear the drums, the chants, the singing, the general celebratory sounds of the village. After a time, I walked to my door and looked out. The air was pitch black so that the blaze of the fire seemed all the redder, a fierce, leaping flame. The people were dancing around it, and among them I saw Martine. She seemed entirely at home, her face radiant in the firelight, her long hair swinging back and forth, her white arms swaying palely in the dark air. She turned in a slow circle, her arms going up and down her body in the same dance as the women around her, sensuous and earthy, her expression at once joyful and serene. But beautiful as it was, it was not a vision I could enjoy without peril, because in order to stay in Lubanda, I had a job to do. And so I was soon back at my desk, writing my report, the one I would send to Bill in Rupala the next day, my work now very different from any I had ever imagined for myself. For without consciously realizing its consequences or calculating its awesome risks, I had become a spy.

Rupala: 11:15
A
.
M
.

“The president certainly would not have kept you waiting, Mr. Campbell,” the minister tells me as he gently takes my arm and turns me from the window.

“It’s not his fault,” I assure him. “I’m early. I know that our appointment is for noon, but when I landed in Rupala it was already after ten. I’d hoped to have time to go to my hotel, freshen up a bit, but with my late arrival, I had no time for that.” I smile cordially. “I didn’t want to be late for my appointment with the president.”

The minister returns a smile as warm as my own. “I am sure he would have understood,” he tells me. “He is, as his life has demonstrated, a very patient man.”

And patient he has surely been, Lubanda’s new, reformist president. Patient in exile, endlessly railing against Mafumi’s madness, calling for regime change from podiums in London, Paris, Copenhagen. Patient as one after another of his exiled compatriots fell to Mafumi’s assassins. Patient as he himself escaped numerous attempts on his life: stabbed in Lyon, shot at in Brussels, almost run over in Oslo, the last attack having left him with a slight limp. Everything about him suggests this unearthly patience. He is modest in his dress, and wears the scholarly gold-rimmed glasses that mark him as a thoughtful man, by all accounts fluent in English, German, and French, a moderate man whose inner compass shifts neither north nor south, but holds with impressive steadiness to his hope for Lubanda’s future.

“It is only now that the president’s work really begins, of course,” the minister reminds me. “Lubanda was pillaged by Mafumi. He took everything and left us only”—he stops and nods toward the window, where the voices of the children can now be heard singing the new national anthem—“orphans.”

This is a dreadful portrait of Lubanda’s current situation, but on the road from the airport to the Presidential Palace I’d seen heartbreaking evidence for its accuracy. There’d been shantytowns as far as the eye could see, their dusty alleys filled with children. In addition, I’d passed a large tent city that looked like nothing so much as a vast field of tattered cloth flapping in the dry wind. And under each flap, of course, there’d been another gathering of destitute children.

“We would bring them all to the palace if we could,” the minister informs me. “But as you know, our resources are limited.”

I glance to the left, where a framed map of Lubanda is displayed. It is a paper map, dry and cracked with the years. A swath of brown traverses the map east to west and in that way designates the great savanna the Lutusi had once roamed. A black dot indicates the village of Tumasi, but there is nothing to designate Martine’s farm, nor the dusty side of the road where Ufala had found Fareem so badly beaten, his first words to her spoken in delirium,
Martine, Martine
.

The minister clearly sees the distress that suddenly rises in me, though he could have no idea of its cause.

“I am told that it has been many years since you were in Lubanda,” he says cautiously, perhaps in order to return me to some less troubling frame of mind. “And that you are now living in New York.”

I turn from the map. “I came back ten years ago,” I said. “And I came again a month ago.”

The minister is clearly surprised to hear of this most recent trip. “You came to Lubanda a month ago? Why did you not tell us? We would have welcomed you and—”

“I came in secret,” I inform him. “By way of Accra, then overland to the border. I crossed it at Gomoa. Without a visa.”

“You entered our country illegally,” the minister states without either alarm or accusation. “It is easy to do in the north.” He looks at me quizzically. “But why did you come to Lubanda in such a way?”

“I was on a mission,” I answer. “A secret mission. It had to do with a murder.”

The word “murder” has always had a sobering effect, and I can see proof of that in the minister’s eyes. It is as if simply hearing the word puts one at risk.

“Seso Alaya,” I add.

The minister clearly does not recognize the name.

“He was a friend of mine,” I inform the minister. “He was murdered in New York City three months ago.”

The minister does not react in any way to this added information save with a quiet, “I’m sorry to hear of this.”

He adds nothing to this expression of condolence. I do not press the matter, but instead let my attention drift back to the map. A slightly weaving line designates Tumasi Road, but no mark indicates the great wrong that occurred along its route. If life were kind, it would provide such markers, so that we could contemplate the risks, and thus be far more careful in terms of what we do. Halted in place, we would look ahead and judge whether hope or despair should guide us, vengeance, force, or mercy stay our hand.

But life is as it is, in all things as desperate and uncertain as the hope I have brought for Lubanda.

Because there seemed no way to pursue Seso’s death, I’d more or less returned to my usual routine after showing Bill the photograph I’d bought from Dalumi. And yet, I continued to take it out and look at it from time to time. What could possibly have driven Seso to come so far? Hope has sometimes inspired such effort, I knew, but it has usually been driven forward by an even deeper fear.

Fear.

Another of risk management’s simple formulations returned to me:
Fear freezes action.
I recognized that as a statement, this was, to say the least, a penetrating glimpse into the obvious, one so leaden, in fact, that it could only have taken wing in an academic wind tunnel, in my case a university classroom presided over by a forgettable professor who, to my surprise, had added a salient point to this otherwise quite unspectacular pronouncement. Standing behind a podium, he’d paused dramatically, stared solemnly at his captive audience, then added, “This is the simple truth that every schoolyard bully knows, along with every tyrant. Fear governs the human heart, and only the deepest and most passionate of purposes can overcome it.”

I’d sat in the classroom that afternoon, surrounded by students far too naïve to grasp the cold reality of what the professor had just said, and thought again of the sweltering afternoon Seso had burst through the door of my house in Tumasi, breathless, terrorized.
You must come! You must come!

Since returning from my last, ill-fated trip to Lubanda some ten years before, I’d avoided the memory of such fiercely unsettling moments. But now, by looking into Seso’s murder, I’d ventured out of that risk-aversive cocoon, though only far enough to reach a dead end with regard to my little investigation. The odd thing was that despite reaching that dead end, I’d continued to feel uneasy and sometimes distracted, and at all times strangely empty. It was as if a small bird had briefly taken wing within the vast empty spaces of my soul, then, following its short flight, had settled back into a nest it no longer found comfortable.

Perhaps it was that deep discomfort, the unfilled hole within me, that once again returned me to my own little tribe, the classics. I thought of Venus, how she’d pleaded with Adonis to hunt only easy prey. In Tumasi, that male/female role had been reversed, I who’d urged Martine to be cautious, to weigh her actions, and finally to compromise, she who’d refused every avenue of escape.

We’d been standing beside my Land Cruiser the first night I’d pointed out the risks inherent in her position. By then I no longer had to make up reasons to drop in on her. I was a secret agent now, making contact with my target.

But why had I accepted my new mission as a spy?

The answer, of course, was simple. I wanted Martine to compromise, because I wanted her to be safe and I felt that her position was putting her at increasing risk. Malcolm Early’s warning was continually ringing in my ears, each time more convincingly. Martine was a very conspicuous thorn in the side of Rupala’s plan to develop Tumasi, and the big men in the capital would have to find a way to pull it out. It would be far better, it seemed to me, if Martine could see this as inevitable and any resistance to it as futile. If reporting her activities to Bill Hammond might serve that effort in some way, then spy I would.

But there was also this: I wanted to buy time for her to fall in love with me more deeply than she had for Nadumu, and I’d come to believe that perhaps she would. She was somewhat older now, after all, and certainly she no longer romanticized any aspect of life in Lubanda as perhaps she had some years before. In addition, there was evidence—for the possibility that her feelings for me were deepening. She’d begun to come to the market more often, and to invite me to her farm more often. We took long walks and talked of our pasts, she of her father’s death when she was fifteen and her consequent struggle to keep the farm afloat in the wake of that loss, I of an easy Midwestern childhood, followed by my move to New York and my work in a school there. We’d talked about books as well, and it had become clear that she’d read considerably more English novels than just
Wuthering Heights,
the book
she’d referenced the night she’d told me about Nadumu. She’d also talked in considerable detail about the terrible things her grandfather had done in Congo as a member of the
Force Publique
—the villages he’d torched, the prisoners he’d tortured, the massacres that had been carried out at his command—a bloody personal history that I thought might explain Martine’s seemingly unbreakable commitment to Lubanda, an effort, as I suggested on that evening, a week or two after my meeting with Malcolm Early, at atonement.