A Dancer In the Dust

by Thomas H. Cook

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll never forget it.”

  I’d always known that there are short goodbyes and long ones, but with Bill’s call I’d discovered that there were certain things no farewell can put behind you, that we are made, in the end, by the things we can’t forget.

  On the heels of that recognition, Martine returned to me in the peculiar, disjointed way of memory. It was not a vision of the first time I’d seen her, nor the last, but of somewhere around the midpoint of the time I’d known her.

  In this memory, she is standing in her spare field, a hardscrabble farmer if ever there was one. We have just walked the land line of her acreage, where she’s pointed out the plowed earth and told me what she’s planted. The bright light of the sun turns her red hair to flame. She looks away, then faces me again, staring at me so intently I feel like a small animal in the crosshairs of her gaze.

  “What are you thinking, Martine?” I ask her.

  She gazes at me a moment, then bends forward, takes up a handful of soil, and looks at it as if, for all the world, she is part of the earth she now lets stream from her spreading fingers. “It’s very odd, I know,” she says with a sudden, radiant smile, “but when I walk these fields, or into the village, or out into the bush, l feel the strangest joy.”

  Joy. Yes, that had been it, I thought now as I recalled that moment. Martine had found joy in the very look and feel and tastes and sounds of Lubanda, and amid those richly sensual delights, she had awakened each day as if it were Christmas morning and there, before her, arrayed beneath the glittering tree, bound in bright colors and ribboned with gold, had lain the richest of life’s pleasures to unwrap.

  This memory lingered awhile before I returned myself to the risk-aversive world I’d chosen after leaving Lubanda. I knew that had I gone on to have a normal life after Tumasi, been able to forget what happened there, what I did there, I might later have married a woman who, at this critical moment of risk assessment, would surely have asked worriedly, “Why, Ray? Why open yourself up to all that again?”

  I knew what my response would have been.

  Because I have to.

  “And why is that?”

  My answer would have been simple: Because it is long and sad and red with blood, my tale of Lubanda.

  And yet, even as I imagined such an exchange, I knew that although my story was Lubandan in the sense of having taken place during my Lubandan interval, Martine’s tale, at least in the larger sense, was not Lubandan at all. Rather, it was the story of one who’d believed she had a home only to discover that she didn’t, believed that love was enough, when it wasn’t, believed that he who’d loved her most would have understood the singular joy that had been hers and helped her keep it. I had no doubt that to believe such things strongly, and follow them courageously, as Martine had done, should have bestowed a measure of victory upon her final act. But that day, as I confronted my year in Lubanda once again, it seemed to me that instead of crowning her with laurel, Martine’s good faith—the very substance of her unique and precious happiness—had merely opened the door to a far more tragic fate, and in doing so proved yet again how lonely are the brave.

  3

  “Some people think the elephant head was given to the club by Teddy Roosevelt,” Bill told me as we entered the main hall of the Harvard Club, “but it was really a guy named William Sewall, Class of 1897, who shot it.” He glanced about at the other animal heads that adorned the paneled walls. “Along with some other unfortunate creatures.”

  I noticed a moose and an ibex, with its gracefully curled horns. There were warthogs and reindeer, too, along with a wapiti. The guns of Harvard worthies had fired on these animals in North America and Asia, in Kenya and Tanzania. There must have been a time, I thought, when they’d felt their reach infinite. Perhaps they still did.

  “There’s always some politically correct talk of taking down these trophies,” Bill continued. “But so far, the board has voted no.”

  With that, he turned and escorted me into the dining room, where we chatted briefly before a waiter came forward with pad and pen. “Gentlemen?” he asked quietly.

  “Have whatever you like, Ray,” Bill said. “The trust has deep pockets.”

  I ordered a cup of fruit. Bill had the works. He’d always been portly, but now he was hovering near obesity, which made him look a bit sloppy despite the Hickey Freeman suit. It was hard to look at him without calculating the many risks his eating habits had accrued: high cholesterol, gout, blockages of various arteries, fatty liver. By no standard could he be judged attractive, and yet he had the distinct air of a man well acquainted with remote places and peoples, and the table talk of such people is always spiced with the exotic and the faintly dangerous, neither of which had been part of my life for a very long time.

  “So, still a bachelor?” Bill asked.

  “Marriage is risky,” I said with a quick smile, “and parenthood is riskier still.”

  “Risk management is theoretically a good thing, of course,” Bill said. Then he added with a hint of warning, “But in real life, you have to take risks, don’t you?”

  “Not really, no,” I answerd. “For that reason, first base will always be the most crowded.”

  “I thought you were a classicist,” Bill said with a laugh. “What’s with the sports allusions?”

  “My clients like them,” I told him truthfully.

  “Your clients,” Bill repeated. “So, tell me, what do you do for them exactly?”

  “Mostly I advise investors looking to buy a failing business on the chance they can turn it around,” I said.

  “What do you tell them?”

  “To calculate the assets, subtract the debt, then take a leap into the dark.”

  “It’s the darkness you stress, I’ll bet.”

  “Risk is always risk,” I said.

  “No doubt,” Bill agreed.

  After leaving Lubanda, he’d landed a job in the State Department, the African desk, never an important position and probably a career dead end, nothing but famine and AIDS, warlords and atrocities. The good news was that he’d parlayed his brief experience at State into a cushy job of funding aid programs throughout the continent. He was now at the top of the heap, the Mansfield Trust being a kind of holding company for a large number of charitable institutions and NGOs. At its recommendation, billions in aid might or might not pour into any particular country. Its decisions were closely followed by senators and representatives, as well as by the USIA, the International Monetary Fund, and a host of less muscular organizations. The stamp of the Mansfield Trust was a green light to open the dam and let aid cascade in. If Mansfield turned off the tap, other means would have to be found to deal with a nation’s problems, abject supplication having failed.

  “Do you still have plenty to spend?” I asked. “I would have thought the last downturn might have narrowed the pipe a little.”

  “No, the people with the big bucks always have big bucks,” Bill said. “The problem is that they generally prefer to give to the opera or the art museum, cultural stuff that gets their name in the program or guarantees invitations to prominent events. That’s the kind of giving that makes them feel like big shots. But they also respond to pictures of kids with bloated bellies and flies on their faces.”

  “Which is what you give them?”

  Bill was not at all defensive. “Sure, but not enough to gag a maggot. And as you know, Ray, there’s always the unpredictable thing that turns off the spigot. That business in Mogadishu, for example. A dancing, cheering mob dragging American soldiers through the streets. Talk about fund-drive hell. People close their wallets when they see shit like that. They don’t say it, of course, but they watch that howling mob and they say, ‘Fuck those goddamn savages.’ So they punish a whole continent for what a few thugs do.”

  When I made no response to this, Bill said quite pointedly, “You’re not like that, are you, Ray?”

  “I don’t know what you me
an.”

  “I guess I’m asking if you’re still an idealist.”

  “Well, the answer is, I’m not,” I told him.

  Bill looked anything but surprised. “Truth be told, I’m not either, really,” he said. He looked at me quite seriously. “Once you give human nature a seat at the table, the progressive horizon narrows right away.” He leaned back slightly. “But that sense of mission, that feeling that brought you to Lubanda back in the day, is there any of that left in you?”

  My expression answered for me.

  In response to it, Bill smiled, but sadly. “Well, hope is easy to lose. Especially in a place like Lubanda.”

  “We could afford to lose hope,” I reminded him. “We had someplace to go.”

  He knew I was talking about Martine.

  “A tragic case,” he said. “You can’t have a balanced life if you don’t love your country. Isn’t that what one of your precious Greeks said?”

  He was referencing Plato, of course. “Martine loved her country,” I told him. “The problem is that her country didn’t love her back.”

  Bill was silent for a moment. I suspected that he was trying to find an appropriate return, something that would put a soothing perspective on Martine’s fate. But there was no way to do that, as he clearly discovered, so he simply gave up and turned to the matter that had brought me here.

  “Seso was found in one of those cheap hotels the African street vendors live in,” he said. “Not much more than an SRO, but big enough for them to squat with their phony Rolex watches and Gucci bags.” He smiled in that sardonic way of his. “Made in China, of course. Nobody makes anything in Africa anymore. They don’t even make sisal. Not for themselves or anybody else.”

  “Nylon came along,” I said. “Who buys sisal?”

  “Plenty of people, actually,” Bill answered. “Brazil produces two hundred fifty thousand tons. Kenya doesn’t produce a tenth of that.”

  He waited for me to make some argument against this dire assessment of the continent’s lack of productivity, but I had none to offer. Everything had gone wrong. The three C’s of devastation: corruption, crime, chaos. Add the rampant spread of AIDS to that mix and the road to hell was fully paved. Of course, it was easy to lay all this at the foot of that fourth demonic C, colonialism. At a conference in Cape Town, I’d even heard an academic apologist claim that rampant black-on-black rape was caused by the anger of African men in the wake of colonialism, a causal link that seemed farcical by almost any standard.

  Bill appeared to see some part of this going through my mind, and so he said nothing more on the subject, but instead drew a photograph from his jacket pocket, lay it facedown on the table, and slid it over to me.

  “Seso,” he said.

  I picked up the picture and felt an unexpected tremor of emotion, one of those silent gasps the soul makes quite involuntarily, as if to remind you that it’s still there.

  In the photograph, Seso lies in a littered back alley. He is on his back, his arms folded over the orb of his stomach. As for dress, it was strictly African street vendor: a long sleeved shirt, cheap pants frayed at the cuffs, a cracked brown belt. The shirt’s open collar revealed a deep but slender line around his throat.

  “Garroted,” I said. “Piano wire?”

  “Mafumi’s favorite, wasn’t it? He liked to draw them up slowly, as I recall, using a hand crank operated by the victim’s wife or children.”

  Such had been the tale. I had no idea if it was true.

  “Where’d you get the picture?” I asked.

  “The cops gave it to me,” Bill answered. “It seems they found a paper with my name and phone number in Seso’s room. A detective by the name of Max Regal came to my office. He showed me the paper, and yes, there it was, my name and number.”

  “Why would Seso have had your name and number?” I asked.

  Bill hesitated, but only briefly, then said, “Seso called me last week. He said he had something to show me, but he wouldn’t tell me what it was.”

  He saw my doubtful look and lifted his hand. “Swear to God, Ray, I have no idea what he had.”

  “Did you tell the cop about the phone call?”

  “Of course I did,” Bill said. “This is a murder investigation.”

  I looked at the photograph again, Seso in his ruin, a picture that called up Lubanda with a vividness that seemed undimmed by time, so that I again saw him as I’d once known him, Watusi-tall, dressed in the flannel trousers and white cotton shirt he’d bought in Rupala and which, for Lubanda, passed for business dress.

  Bill folded one beefy arm over the other. “Mind if I ask when you last heard from Seso?”

  The question brought me back to the paneled stateliness of the Harvard Club.

  “When I was in Lubanda ten years ago,” I answered. “Before my unsuccessful attempt to make it back to Tumasi. We met in Rupala before I headed north.”

  “He was living in Rupala?” Bill asked.

  “Yes,” I answered. “He had a government job.”

  “Working for Mafumi?”

  “He worked in the archive. I wouldn’t call it ‘working’ for Mafumi.”

  “Okay, so you met in Rupala. Tell me about that.”

  “We just sat and talked for a while in Independence Square,” I said. “There’d just been a public execution. Some prostitutes. Six of them were still hanging from the gibbet.”

  Bill looked at me doubtfully. “Since when have prostitutes been hanged in Lubanda?” he asked. “Mafumi preferred them, as I recall.”

  “These prostitutes were men,” I told him, “And ‘prostitution’ was just the charge.”

  “Gay in Lubanda, what could be riskier than that?” Bill took a sip of coffee. “So this work Seso was doing. Did he talk about that? The job in the archive, I mean.”

  I folded my napkin and placed it neatly on the table beside my plate. “Actually, you could hardly call it an archive because it was just a few rooms where papers were stashed,” I said. “There was no order to it. Seso was just going through the papers.”

  “Looking for what?”

  “Money, of course.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that Mafumi’s people thought President Dasai and his cronies had stashed funds outside the country,” I said. “He had that Third World fantasy of a Swiss bank account, so he set people like Seso, people who could read and do arithmetic, to work finding it.”

  “How did Seso seem when you met him?”

  “He was guarded, which was natural enough,” I answered. “He said he’d married, and that his wife was expecting. When I got back here, I wrote him a letter, but he never wrote back and I never heard from him again.”

  “Those Lubandans have a way of vanishing, don’t they?” Bill said with a kind of dark nostalgia.

  I glanced toward the far end of the room, the animal heads that hung in the distance. “So, what do you want from me, Bill? Why this meeting, all these questions? I’m not a cop or a private investigator.”

  Bill glanced down, then looked up again, his gaze now quite full of purpose. “I’d like for you to nose around a little, see what you can find out about Seso.” He allowed a moment for this to sink in, then added, “I know I’m asking a lot.” He was silent for a time, his gaze unaccountably directed toward the great elephant head, a creature too magnificent, its death too tragic, to be memorialized this way, the masthead of an entrance hall. “Lubanda was hard on everybody.”

  “It was hardest on Martine,” I said.

  I suddenly saw her just as she’d first appeared to me, her hair tucked beneath a checkered scarf, leaning over a basket, glancing up as I approached. How like Martine that first glance had been, a no-nonsense expression, but somewhat quizzical. Everything she looked at, she questioned, as if the only thing she could be sure of was herself.

  Bill released a breath that seemed weighted with bad memories. “I sometimes wonder how different things might have been if Martine had jus
t—”

  “Stop,” I said sharply. I glanced away, then, after a moment, turned back to Bill. “Just… stop,” I repeated softly.

  And he did, his eyes darting from table to table before he settled them once again on me.

  “So, will you do it, Ray?” he asked. “Will you make a few inquiries into Seso’s murder?”

  Before answering, I asked a question of my own. “Why do you care about this? You haven’t seen Seso in years.”

  “Well, the truth is, the Mansfield Trust is poised to offer a great deal of aid to Lubanda,” Bill answered. “And if we do that, so will everybody else. It could change the country.”

  “What does Seso’s death have to do with whether the Mansfield Trust opens the money chute?” I asked.

  “It probably doesn’t,” Bill answered. “But it’s a loose end that bothers me. I like all my ducks in a row.” He smiled. “Mixed metaphors. Sorry.” His tone grew serious. “Think of it in terms of your business. I don’t want to risk missing the mark with regard to Lubanda. If Seso had something I need to see, then I want to see it.”

  “You’re afraid not to see it,” I said.

  “Life’s a trickster, Ray,” Bill said. “I like to know if there’s a rabbit in the hat.” He looked at me in the way of one who’d shared a searing experience. “It’s always the thing we don’t know that destroys us.”

  A staple truth of risk assessment came to mind: the fear of loss is sometimes all that is needed to incur it. Certainly the awful knowledge of what I’d done in Lubanda had kept me from going back to Tumasi, Martine’s farm, my one year of living dangerously. Save for the single failed attempt I’d made ten years before, I’d avoided the risk of going back there, or even of thinking about it, the error of my own actions still more than my self-protective soul could take.