A Dancer In the Dust (31 page)

It was a village that had later turned to Mafumi, and thus it had been spared the sort of treatment Janetta and Kinisa had received. In fact, tattered posters of the Lion of God still hung here and there in the village, along with a long-outdated government newsletter whose first page was devoted to Mafumi’s thoughts, such as they were: that AIDS was caused by a “Western poison” President Dasai had disguised as an antimalarial pill; that all art and culture had originally flowed out of Africa, only to be stolen by the West; that one day Lubandans would rule the world from a spacecraft launched from the solar system to which they’d gone “before this world began.” Compared with such transparent lunacy, Nyerere’s fraudulent weather predictions were the pinnacle of reason. And yet, it all seemed of a piece somehow, the magical thinking of a continent ravaged on all sides, first in the theft of its resources, and second, as Martine had written in her
Open Letter,
“in the theft of its will.”

Little remained of the small, makeshift constabulary where Fareem and I had found Seso save for a single, crumbling wall, now overrun with vines, its cracked cement floor spouting grasses and one dusty fern. Still, it provided a step, or at least a marker, for it was here that I’d stopped ten years before, stopped and turned around and headed back to Rupala, then onto a plane that had returned me to my risk-aversive life.

After a moment, I headed back toward the road, but not before stopping to look more closely at one of the village’s Mafumi posters, the Emperor of All Peoples sitting proudly on his elephant-tusk throne, a photograph I’d seen in
The New York Times
some years before
.
It was the last time any mention of Lubanda had actually appeared in the
Times,
in an article that had thoroughly chronicled Mafumi’s authoritarian clownishness: his claims to have raised the dead, cured the sick, laid curses upon his enemies so that their arms had withered and their eyes had fallen out of their heads. One of the author’s unnamed sources, a local named Bashir Rutani, had later been found hanging by his feet in a deserted playground. The sign dangling from his toes had said “Child Molester,” but there was no record of his ever having been one.

“Who are you?”

I turned to see a tall, thin man standing just behind me, a panga dangling from his hand.

“I’m an American,” I answered. “I’m headed north, up Tumasi Road.”

He nodded toward Mafumi’s presidential portrait. “Our chief made good magic.”

I knew that he did not mean this as a joke. Mafumi’s magical powers had long been an ideological pillar of his rule. The stories were printed as fact in the country’s only newspaper, mainly in pictures. Films were also shown on Lubanda’s only television station. Few Lubandans owned televisions, however, and for that reason VHS cassettes had borne the weight of propounding this grotesque mythology, transported in military jeeps to the remotest villages, along with a boxy old television and an electric generator that could produce enough electricity to play the president’s miracle movies. There he’d been in living color, Mafumi blessing plants that abruptly sprouted, healing stricken livestock that instantly rose to their feet and galloped away. In Rupala, they’d been distributed by the Lubandan Youth Corps, the president’s cadre of teenaged boys, some of whom had been fully armed. The single cassette I’d gotten my hands on had later been seized at the airport. “Not to leave Lubanda,” the guard told me, then tossed the tape into a large plastic bucket filled with other things that were not to leave Lubanda: medicine, tins of food, foreign currency, pornographic magazines.

“But the new chief, he does not make magic,” the man added contemptuously. “The new chief does not have big powers.”

There was only one picture of Fareem, the “new chief” in this still Mafumi-intoxicated village. It hung from the side of a storm fence, a different portrait from the one I’d seen at the consulate office in New York, the president dressed casually in flannel shirt and trousers, his arms outspread as he welcomes a group of children. The legend said simply:
The President Embraces the Future of Lubanda.
There were slashes across his face, and his ears were gone, his eyes gouged out.

The man slapped his hand with the panga and stared grimly at Fareem’s picture. He didn’t need to say what he felt; it was obvious in the malevolent glitter of his eyes. He would have liked nothing better than to slice Lubanda’s current president in two.

Ten years before I’d been pressed forward only by moral anguish, a wind whose force, as I’d discovered in that failed effort, is quickly dissipated. Now, however, was different, the purpose of my present journey not to redeem myself, but to save Fareem from the likes of the man who stood before me, glaring menacingly at this same portrait.

Surely if any man on earth deserved protection, I told myself, it was Fareem. But on that thought, I recalled the hatred in his eyes when I’d last seen him, his contempt for the hope I’d presumptuously believed myself to be bringing to Lubanda. Once again I heard his voice:
Do you know what Martine thinks of you?

I did know now, and I also knew that she’d been right. But twenty years before, I’d been young and foolish and crazed with love. What mixture could have been more fraught with risk?

The final consequence of that lethal concoction lay before me, and so as politely as possible I said goodbye to the man with the panga and headed toward the road, walking neither hurriedly nor slowly, but at a moderate pace, like an animal determined not to let a far more dangerous animal smell his fear.

The next village down Tumasi Road was little more than a collection of huts. It was called Hanuma, and it was here I’d expected to find Martine when I’d gone in search of her twenty years before. In those days, it had been a village alive with children, where Martine was able to stop, trade her shells for food or water, perhaps camp for the night. It had always been an exceptionally friendly village as well, with much singing and dancing and good fellowship. Once welcomed as a guest, she would have been safe there.

I’d hoped to find Martine still in Hanuma when I’d arrived there late that afternoon. As expected, I’d found the villagers at their routine labors, their chief stretched out on the ground, very much the patriarch, with several women in attendance and two young men intently focused on everything he said.

“I’m looking for a white woman,” I said. Then, with a strange ache of absolute recognition and acceptance, I added, “But Lubandan.”

The chief turned to one of the young men and spoke to him in a language I didn’t recognize.

“I speak English,” the young man said. “Come. I will ask about this woman.”

I followed him as he moved about the village, inquiring if anyone had seen a white woman. No one had, so it seemed clear that Martine had not made it as far as Hanuma, which could only mean that at some point she had decided to leave the road and head overland toward Rupala.

This would vastly decrease her risk, and because of that, I felt great relief at the thought of her moving across the savanna rather than so visibly and provocatively down Tumasi Road. On the savanna the Lutusi would receive her as a guest, give her food and let her camp with them at night. Within three days she would be in Rupala, and I’d already decided that I would drive there, wait for her, and then, if she would allow me, bring her back to her farm, where, I hoped, Fareem’s anger would have subsided.

So I was in a less fearful state of mind by the time the young man escorted me back to my Land Cruiser. No one had seen
Martine
,
and this was good news.

At that point, I’d planned to return to Tumasi, both convinced and relieved that Martine had decided not to take the far more dangerously exposed open road and was now walking overland toward Rupala.

“Thank you,” I said to the young man, then turned back toward the Land Crusier, where, in the distance, I saw a woman moving toward us. She was walking slowly, in the way of someone exhausted, which suggested that she had been on the road for a long time, and thus might have encountered Martine.

We both approached her, and as we did so, her expression grew apprehensive, like one expecting harm. The young man spoke to her in a language I didn’t understand.

“She is nervous because she has seen bad signs,” he told me. “They are very superstitious, her people, always looking for signs.”

“What did she see?”

“Shells,” he answered, “but not from the water. Made of wood. That is why she thought they were bad signs.” He could see that this information had thrown a shadow over me. “She thinks they were put there to trap her. That they were meant to lure her out into the bush. For this reason, she did not leave the road.”

“Did you see a woman?” I asked.

The young man turned to the woman, spoke to her, received her response, then looked at me. “She saw only the shells.”

Only the shells.

There are moments in life when you are forced to accept what De Quincey called “the lurking consciousness” of a terrifying truth, moments when you know that something has gone catastrophically wrong, and that you were an instrument of that wrong. Such had been that instant for me.

I’d recalled that terrible moment many times during the twenty years that had passed since then, but never more vividly than when I reached the place on Tumasi Road where I’d brought the Land Cruiser to a halt at the spot where the woman had seen Martine’s shells. For that reason, only the pull of the macabre would have made me stop again and head out into the bush, as I had done on that heartbreaking afternoon. And so I didn’t stop, but instead walked on through the morning mist, then on through the midday heat, and finally through the cool of approaching evening, when at last I reached Tumasi.

The entire village was in the same state of disrepair as Kinisa, save for a tall storm fence enclosure that had been erected near the road. It was here, I suspected, that whatever was valuable had to be kept in order to prevent its being looted. But there was nothing inside the fence, and beside it only a metal pipe that rose about six feet, then curled over in a spout.

To my immense surprise, Ufala, now impossibly old and shriveled, sat at a roadside stand not far from the fence. She was selling cassava and was obviously amazed to see a white man. But as I drew near, she recognized me, though with what level of suspicion or dread I could not imagine.

“It’s been a long time,” I said.

I could see that, like Bisara before her, Ufala was trying to decide if I could be trusted. And she was right to be cautious, for in a world of such dire risk, the most dangerous risk of all is the one it takes to trust someone else.

“I’ve come to talk to you about Seso,” I said. “I’m sure you remember him.”

Ufala nodded.

“He was murdered in New York City three months ago,” I added.

Ufala stared at me silently, but I could see a tension building behind her eyes. Everything in life brought her trouble, and surely I was no different from the rest. But she had always been one to calculate the risks, then take the road least pitted with them, and I had little doubt that she was doing that this very moment.

“You remember that Seso was Lutusi,” I said.

She nodded again, but remained silent.

“And when the Lutusi have something valuable to trade, they leave it with someone they trust,” I continued. “Seso had something valuable to trade, and I think he left it with you.”

I had started thinking this the moment I’d learned that Seso had not left whatever it was he had for Bill Hammond with Bisara. So there had to be someone else. It could have been anyone, of course, but surely Seso would have known that any close associate would have fallen under suspicion, and that for that reason it would be less risky to give it to a more distant acquaintance, and even better to leave it with a woman, whom no man would suspect of being trustworthy. If this was true, I reasoned, then Seso might possibly have left it with Ufala. It was a long shot, I knew, but it was the only shot I had.

I told Ufala all of this, though it was difficult to tell how much of it she understood. She was very, very old, after all, and suspicious by nature. Nor did I have anything to offer her, save what suddenly occurred to me—a threat.

“If you have what Seso gave you,” I warned her, “some men are going to come here and they are going to do bad things to you.”

Ufala remained silent.

“Seso is dead, and, besides, you don’t owe him anything,” I told her. “Why take a chance on being hurt?”

I couldn’t tell if she believed any of what I’d told her, or even cared, since it was possible that Seso had never given her anything. But I had come all this way on unproven suppositions, so why not follow the road I’d taken to its end.

And so I waited. For a long time, Ufala stared at me in that inert posture I remembered from so many years before. Then, as if an answer had come to her in the wind, she rose and waved me to follow her. We walked through the old market, which was stirring a bit, past the little house in which I’d lived and worked, now filled with stacks of cassava and kindling. I saw again the stalls, the produce, the small milling crowds. I thought that a few of the villagers recognized me, but I wasn’t sure. I had changed a great deal since then, grown older and grayer, and with a far less hopeful sparkle in my eyes.

At the far end of the village, we came to a hut. Ufala pointed to it, then to herself.

“Yours,” I said.

She nodded, then bent down and went inside.

Waiting outside her hut, I could smell the various grains of the region, millet and fonio and teff. In the absence of aid, beyond the pressures of the global market, the people of Tumasi had returned to their ancient grains.

When Ufala emerged again, she was carrying a small sack. She glanced at the pots that lay about the fire pit just beyond the entrance, one of which I recognized as having once been Martine’s.

When she saw that I recognized it, she said, “Men bring her back and put her on fire. They do this in the field behind her house. And when she burn up, they kick around the ashes.”