A Dancer In the Dust (27 page)

“And you feel that at that point, Martine would leave Lubanda?” Bill asked.

I nodded. “And when you get down to brass tacks, isn’t that really what Gessee and the others want… a black Lubanda?”

Bill was silent for a moment, clearly reluctant to admit this stark truth of Lubandan politics, but at last unable to deny it. “But where would she go?” he asked. “She isn’t a citizen of any country but Lubanda.”

“She could go to the States,” I said.

“With you?” Bill asked. “You mean as your—”

“Yes,” I interrupted.

Bill smiled knowingly. “It’s like that old Bible story, isn’t it? The one about David and Bathsheba. How David sent her husband, Uriah, to the forefront of the battle in order to kill him.”

“I’m not killing anyone,” I said. “I just know that Martine has to leave Lubanda… whether she wants to or not.”

At that moment we were two men in collusion with regard to a woman whose best interest we were convinced we knew better than she knew it, a woman whose future we were conspiring to shape without regard to the risk we ran of distorting it.

“So, I take it you want me to tell Gessee about Martine’s grandfather,” Bill said.

“Yes.”

Bill’s gaze was unearthly still, and in that stillness I saw our collusion grow darker as he became steadily more convinced that we were of the same tribe, he and I, and for that reason we should naturally join forces to rescue a third member of our pale clan from a life we had decided she had no right to choose.

At last, he nodded. “All right,” was all he said.

On the ride back to Tumasi, I knew exactly what Bill was going to do. He was going to call Gessee and give him the power he needed to deal with Martine with a finality that would surely appeal to him, and which could be provided to him via a mechanism enshrined in the Lubandan Constitution rather than any further resort to transparently phony last-minute laws. As a treacherous scheme, it was perfect, because Martine herself would never know what I’d done.

She was on her dusty little porch when I got to her farm that evening.

“How did it go in Rupala?” she asked tensely, as if her life depended upon whatever news I had for her, a fact far more certain than she knew.

I sat down and released a dramatic sigh. “I’m sorry, Martine.” I told her. “There’s nothing anyone can do.”

She drew a small piece of wood from the pile beside her chair and began to whittle it with her father’s pocketknife. “I did not think there would be.”

I hesitated long enough to take a breath, then delivered far graver news. “And they’re going to take away your Lubandan citizenship.”

She looked darkly amazed that such a thing could even be contemplated.

“But I was born here,” she said.

“I know, but there’s something in the Constitution,” I told her. “It’s about the descendants of people who committed acts against Negritude. Acts against blacks at any place or any time. Like the ones done by your grandfather in—”

“That provision has never been applied to anyone,” Martine interrupted in a way that suggested her complete dismissal of this ploy. “It was just part of the anticolonial rhetoric back when Lubanda became independent. Some racist fringe group wanted it, and Dasai caved in to get the Constitution ratified. It was never meant to—”

“Yes, but it’s there, Martine,” I said. “It’s there in black and white and they’re going to apply it to you.”

She stared at me silently, as if numbed by an unexpected blow.

And so I waited, as she sat, very still, like someone in a daze. It was surely sinking in, I thought, the desperate nature of her situation, the fact that there was no way out of it. She would lose her land and her citizenship. She would be declared an alien, and anything might happen after that. She would be a woman alone, a woman without resources, in a country that had cast her out.

“You have to leave Lubanda, Martine,” I said. “With your citizenship revoked, you wouldn’t even be entitled to work here. You wouldn’t just be landless, you’d be… homeless.”

Her eyes glistened. “An orphan.”

It was but one level of the depth of my error that I’d expected her finally to accept the unforgiving and irrevocable fact that she was not and never would be Lubandan. I was certain that from the ruins of this newly enforced orphanhood, she would begin to fashion another life in another place. After all, as I had so carefully calculated, no other choice remained to her. I had set her adrift in the bulrushes, utterly confident that I could also pluck her from them.

But instead of accepting the dire fact I had just presented to her, Martine suddenly gave a defiant jerk of the knife, then rose quickly and fiercely and stood, staring down at me, her hair falling in a red curtain to her shoulders, the blade of her knife glinting in the candlelight. “How can I repay you, Ray?” she asked in a tone so ambivalent I wondered if she’d guessed my treason, and now intended to repay me by cutting my throat.

She didn’t wait for an answer, but as if in response to some inner signal, she turned and walked into the house. I remained on the porch, unsure of what to do, listening as she moved about inside. I heard drawers opened and closed, papers shuffled.

When she returned to the porch she was carrying a large cloth bag. “It’s cured goat,” she said as she held it before me. “I wish I had something of more value,” she added with a thin smile, “But I am only a poor Lubandan farmer.”

Since there seemed nothing else to do, I took the bag. “Thank you,” I said, and started to rise.

“Don’t go,” she said. “Have a drink with me.” Something deep within her seemed to tremble. “I don’t want to be alone right now.”

I nodded.

She was a long time returning with our drinks, and once, glancing toward the house, I saw her standing in the kitchen, her back to me, her head down, her hands gripping the edge of the sink as if to keep herself upright. A few minutes later I heard her crank the gramophone, then the melancholy strains of a cello.

“What are we listening to?” I asked as she returned to the porch and handed me a glass of that familiar homebrew.

“Elgar,” Martine answered. “He wrote it after World War One. He was in mourning for a world he had lost.” Then, to my stark amazement, she faced me with an expression that looked carved of granite. “But I’m not going to lose mine.”

“But Martine, you—”

“I’m going to tell the world about what’s happening here,” she said firmly. “I’m going to write some sort of paper. I’m going to take it to Rupala. I’m going to take it on foot, and give it to anyone who will read it. Reporters. Anyone. They’re going to have to do more than take away my right to be Lubandan. I will never leave Lubanda. They will have to kill me first.”

Within that fiercely voiced assurance, I saw the adamantine nature of Martine’s will. She would never relent, never take any route of escape. I had offered her a way out of Lubanda. With every other door closed, I had hoped she would take it. But now that hope seemed not just tragically misplaced, but deeply and fundamentally in error.

And so later that night, now once again in Tumasi, I hastily sent a note to Bill, telling him that my little plot had failed and that he should keep secret what I’d told him about Martine’s grandfather. The two-word note he returned to me two days later could not have made the nature of my error more obvious
: Too late.

Martine’s determined voice returned to me:
They will have to kill me first.

And I thought,
What have I done?

Rupala: 1:33
P
.
M
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“Where are we going?” I ask as Fareem opens the door of the old black Mercedes that brought me from the airport.

“You will see,” he tells me. “Please, get in before the heat makes both our shirts wet.”

Once inside the car, I glance at the mirror in the front seat and notice that this is not the same driver as the one who met me at the airport. The current man behind the wheel has eyes that sparkle less jovially, and his face is leaner. Perhaps he is one of Beyani’s men. I calculate the risk that my earlier visit to Lubanda has been discovered, along with the dreadful thing I found there. In reponse, I am careful to hold tightly to my briefcase.

“It is good to see you again, Ray,” Fareem says as he settles in beside me, his lean body barely causing a crinkle in the car’s old cracked leather. He glances about the once plush interior, his gaze completely unconcerned by the motionless eyes of the driver. “We are selling Mafumi’s fleet of luxury cars,” he casually informs me, his tone without apprehension that those who once enjoyed the pleasures of this fleet might resist the loss of such luxury. “A consortium in Brussels is taking them all.” He slaps his hands together. “All of them gone, just like dust from the hands.”

“But these cars must have belonged to Mafumi’s old guard,” I say cautiously.

“Of course they did,” Fareem says.

“Won’t they feel deprived of them?”

“Perhaps so, but they will get used to it.”

“I’ve found that those who once had much rarely adapt well to having less,” I tell him.

Fareem offers a look of great sympathy. “Your vision of life has grown much darker since you left Lubanda,” he says.

“Reality has a way of summoning the shadows,” I tell him.

Fareem laughs his worldly laugh. “Is that the view of some Greek oracle?”

“More the simple lesson of experience.”

“Perhaps, so,” Fareem says. “But the lesson of my own experience tells me that men do not need luxury cars as a prerogative of government service.” He smiles. “Besides, such luxury separates them from the people.”

“So what will be the president’s car?” I ask lightly.

“I think perhaps it will be a hybrid,” Fareem answers. “Lubanda has little superstructure at the moment, and so it stands to reason that the president should have a small carbon footprint.”

I glance out the window, Rupala baking in the heat, everything increasing that heat: the packed clay of the ground, the ripple of corrugated metal, the stacks of cement blocks, even the steel rods that jut up from the capital’s many unfinished buildings, structures begun with donor money, then abandoned when the money was withdrawn.

“There is so much left to do in Lubanda,” Fareem says solemnly when he sees me peering out the window.

“Yes,” I agree, thinking now of my mission, uncertain though it is, a shot, as they say, in the dark. “Yes, there is much for Lubandans to do.”

We are now on the wide boulevard that once led from the Agricultural Ministry to Embassy Row, the one street in Rupala that has been repaved and provisioned with traffic signals.

“This is to be Lubanda’s Champs-Élysées,” Fareem tells me. “A proud avenue that will open onto Independence Square.” He shrugs. “At least that is my dream.”

I look at him. “What was Martine’s dream?”

Fareem visibly saddens at the mention of her name. “I don’t know,” he says, then shrugs softly. “A complicated person, Martine.”

“Actually, I think she was quite simple,” I tell him. “And so was her dream.”

I start to tell him what Martine’s dream had been, and of how recklessly I had betrayed her, of the fact that here, in Rupala, twenty years before, I had rolled the dice for a woman who was not even present at the table, and how on the outcome of that toss, a braver and more knowing heart than mine had been forfeited
.
I want to tell him all of that, expose the full measure of my error, but the car suddenly slows and Fareem points straight ahead. “Our national square has taken on a vital function,” he says.

The square is large, and years before it had served the people of Rupala mostly as a park. There were areas of grass and shady walkways. None of this is now visible, however, for what opens before me is a tent city teeming with children.

“This is the tragic legacy of Mafumi,” Fareem tells me as our driver wheels the car over to the curb and brings it to a halt at the southern perimeter of what had once been Independence Square.

“Over there is where they murdered President Dasai,” Fareem says. He nods to the right, where there is nothing but more children. “And there is where his entire cabinet was executed. Their bodies were so riddled with bullets there was nothing to cut down from the post but bloody hunks of flesh.” He shakes his head at the inexplicable savagery of this. “They just kept shooting and shooting.” He looks at me. “There is much evil done in this world.”

“There is, yes,” I tell him, “but almost all of it is done in the name of something good.”

Fareem chooses not to engage my little philosophical remark, but instead, indicates a far corner of the square. “And that is where Farmer Gessee met his end.”

“Yes, I saw it on the Internet,” I tell him. “All the executions. A whole day of them. The ‘White-Out.’ The assault on the zoo.”

Fareem is clearly surprised to hear this. “So you have been following the descent of Lubanda?” he asks.

I nod. “All the way to the bottom.”

He smiles appreciatively. “And now the ascent can begin, I hope.” He glances toward where the new Lubandan flag waves above the square, no doubt daily saluted by its throng of orphans.

“Perhaps our flag should bear a phoenix,” Fareem says cheerfully. “A symbol for new hope.”

“But that’s a Western symbol,” I remind him. “Not in the least Lubandan.”

“Western, yes,” Fareem says. “But perhaps only a suggestion of our shared hopes for this country.” He glances at my briefcase. “Have you brought hope for Lubanda, Ray?”

I nod. “Yes,” I assure him, though I know that what I have brought to this beleaguered land is profoundly risky. Still, all else seems so profoundly to have failed.

I smile sadly, then add. “It is the only hope I have.”

What have I done?

The question was again ringing in my ears as I made my way south, the vegetation growing more sparse with each step.

And so Bill had been right—it was atonement I sought in coming back to Lubanda, an effort to save Fareem because I’d failed to save Martine by assuming that what I wanted for her should be what she also wanted for herself, an error that had set in motion a chain of events that had quickly spun out of control.