A Dancer In the Dust

by Thomas H. Cook

  “What did he talk about?” I asked.

  “Are you asking if he had gold, diamonds?” He laughed, then took a single cigarette from his shirt pocket and lit it. “He was a gloomy one.” The laugh devolved into something less mirthful. “As we say in my country, such a man sometimes speaks of his goats, but only to tell you they are dead.”

  “Gloomy or not, he had something I’m looking for,” I said.

  “Uranium?” Dalumi said, a question that appeared to turn a small key inside him, open a tiny door. “Those Chinese fuckers are taking all of it out of Niger. Building a road to it with their own little yellow prison slaves, so there is no work for us.”

  Ah, so that’s it, I thought. We have our distrust of the Chinese in common.

  “So, you’re from Niger,” I said.

  Dalumi neither confirmed nor denied this. “He was from Lu­banda, this man who is dead. What could he bring from there?” He squinted as if to bring my motives into clearer focus. “How do you know he had something, and why do you want it? What was he to you, the dead one?”

  “Seso called a friend of mine,” I answered. “He said he had something for him. My friend wants to know what it was. He thinks it must have been important if Seso left his family to bring it to him.”

  “Seso had no family,” Dalumi said quite firmly.

  “Yes he did,” I insisted. “He told me this when I last saw him in Rupala.”

  “All gone,” Dalumi said with a dismissive wave of his hand, “The mother died giving birth to his son,” he added in the offhand way his life had taught him to regard the lives of others, that they were transient, fleeting, quickly snuffed out, especially the lives of women and children, since their helplessness only increased their risk. “And the boy was stolen.”

  “Stolen?” I asked.

  “By the Visutu,” Dalumi told me. “That is what he told me. They are a—”

  “They are Mafumi’s tribe,” I interrupted. “Did Seso get his son back?”

  Dalumi shook his head. “He died where the Visutu took him.”

  So Seso had come to the city of dreams only after he’d had no dreams left.

  “Did he mention anyone else from Lubanda?” I asked.

  “Once he talked about a woman,” Dalumi answered. “A farmer, he said. He did not say a name, just that she had a farm and that she was white.”

  This was obviously a reference to Martine, and so I said, “She was white, but she was Lubandan.”

  Lubandan, I repeated in my mind, and suddenly remembered an evening a couple of weeks after the attempt on President Dasai’s life. Fareem, Martine, and I were sitting on the farmhouse porch when a convoy of trucks appeared. Some were civilian, some were military, but all of them had their rear beds crowded with men, women, and children.

  “They are Besai people,” Fareem said. “The president’s tribe.”

  “Where are they headed?” I asked.

  “To the northern provinces,” he answered. “Dasai wants to move his people into that region. This is part of Village Harmony, to bring all the tribes together.”

  Martine peered out at the passing trucks but said nothing. I’d noticed this quiet before, but failed to realize how very deep it was, a statue-in-the-park stillness at her core that reduced the women with whom I’d been involved during college and after it to chattering magpies. Suddenly it seemed to me that I had spent my life pursuing window-shop mannequins when all the time, here in Lubanda, there was this.

  “Dasai will end up like that Tanzanian trickster Julius Nyerere,” Fareem continued. “When he was president of Tanzania, he would listen to the weather forecasts on short-wave radio, then go out and predict the weather.”

  Martine remained locked in her own inner quiet, her gaze now focused on the far horizon not like the gaze of one who dreamed of going beyond it, but one for whom it served as a completely natural border, the sky no more than the blue bowl that held the boundaries of Lubanda.

  “Such things make us a laughingstock,” Fareem said sadly. He took another drink. “Moving the Besai up north will only cause trouble. The Visutu will see the clothes from the West, and the food from the West, and they will want these things, and they will come south to get them.” He followed the trucks as they grew small in the distance. “There is no way to stop it now, this… invasion.”

  Martine made no argument against this dark surmise, but something in her eyes deepened. Finally, very softly, she said, “Maybe not.”

  Had that been the moment? I wondered now, with Dalumi staring at me as if distantly investigating my long silence. Had that been the moment when she’d first conceived of her Open Letter?

  “What did Seso say about her?” I asked Dalumi by way of returning myself to the present.

  “That she was betrayed.”

  Because I knew the risk, I dared not ask by whom.

  “What else did he say about this woman?”

  “He said he worked for her.”

  “But that’s not true,” I said. “Seso worked for me the whole time I was in Lubanda.”

  “He did not mean he worked for this woman then,” Dalumi said firmly.

  “Then when else?” I asked.

  Dalumi’s answer could not have struck him as oddly as it struck me.

  “Now,” he said. “He said he is working for her now.”

  “He couldn’t possibly have been doing that,” I told him adamantly.

  “Then he was a liar,” Dalumi said with an indifferent shrug. “You want to see his things? They are still in his room.” He nodded toward the woman behind the desk. “You will have to pay her,” he added. “But maybe in the room you will find what you are looking for.”

  In every discovery, as I well knew, there is risk. Discover this, and you will withdraw your bet. Discover that, and you will increase it. Most such discoveries are technical, and few are profound. But the deepest discoveries are those that alter the prevailing colors of the moral spectrum, reveal that what seemed right was wrong, and what seemed wrong was right. It is these gravely transforming discoveries we avoid, I had long ago discovered, and yet, without them, I decided now, we forever roll the same stone up the same heartbreaking hill, and then, with heads hung low, follow it down again.

  “I’ll pay her,” I said.

  Dalumi looked pleased. “Okay… boss,” he said in the way of one whose only power was disdain.

  I walked over to the woman behind the desk, and quickly struck a bargain.

  She grasped the bills with fingers that seemed more like talons, then nodded toward the elevator. “Go under the crime scene tape,” she told me firmly. “Don’t rip it. If you do, the cops will give me shit.”

  “I won’t touch it,” I assured her. The police had taken no such investigative precautions on Tumasi Road, I instantly recalled, had made no effort to preserve the scene from contamination nor discover and subsequently apprehend the criminals involved. Nor had any marker ever been erected to note what happened there. It was this failure to memorialize the “Tumasi Road Incident” that now struck me as an added measure of injustice. For the stark truth remains that there are those who shoulder the cross and those who don’t, and that it is those who bear its splintery burden who hold the heart of the world and by that means provide humanity with its only claim to glory. For that reason, something should have stood in commemoration of Martine’s sacrifice, I thought, even if no more than her name etched into a stone.

  “You ready?” Dalumi asked by way of returning me to the present.

  I nodded.

  “Okay, let’s go,” he said, and on that command jerked his head upward, toward the ceiling, his expression fiercely reluctant, dreading the journey, as if he believed what those fiery red Tumasi sunsets had later come to suggest: that hell hung above us, rather than yawned below.

  9

  On the way up to the fourteenth floor of the Darlton Hotel, I considered how strange it was, Seso’s remark about working for Martine. How could he have thought
himself working for her? He had never worked for her, and certainly was in no position to do so now.

  Even so, I couldn’t help considering the curious thing Seso had said to Dalumi. In my usual style, I went through this spare information looking for some sort of linkage. This process got me nowhere save, by an unpredictable twist of mind, to another memory of Martine, the way she’d once remaked, “Once a classicist, always a classicist.” This thought brought Hecate to mind, how her name meant “will” in Greek, and the way in which she’d often been described as a sorceress of inordinate power, having an infinitely far reach through space and time. I knew that Martine would have been amused by this strained comparison, though completely typical of the classical education I’d evidently considered sufficiently preparatory to my efforts in Lubanda.

  She’d walked into the village a week or so after we’d lounged on her porch, watching the trucks loaded with Besai families move north. Fareem had been with her, and once again, as I watched them stroll into the village, it seemed to me that they shared a private vision of some sort.

  I’d been sitting on the steps of my house, honing my proposal to dig a series of wells along the route the nomads traveled across Tumasi, when I’d seen Martine and Fareem, and it struck me that they might know the best location for these wells.

  “The market is charming, isn’t it?” I said cheerfully as I approached them.

  “Yes,” Fareem said with a curious smile. “Charming.”

  For a moment, Martine seemed reluctant to speak, then as if compelled to do so, she said, “Do you want to learn about Tumasi, Ray?”

  “Of course.”

  She didn’t appear entirely convinced of this, but she turned and pointed to a stall where various cuts of meat hung in the open air. “The Lutusi sell their animals to the people here in the village.” She nodded toward other stalls, some with mounds of beads, others selling grains, cassava, bolts of hand-woven cloth. “The nomads buy from those stalls with the money they get from the meat vendors.” She turned to face me. “This is what you would call the ‘economy’ of Tumasi. I am sure you find it very simple.”

  “Well, isn’t it?” I asked with a small laugh.

  “Of course it is,” Martine said. “But it is fragile, too, and changing it would not be simple.”

  I might have asked a question or two about all this had Bill Hammond not suddenly come roaring up in his Land Cruiser. As usual, he was all smiles and self-confidence as he strode toward me, a large cooler under his arm.

  “Hello, Ray,” he said cheerfully. His eyes whipped over to Martine. “Bill Hammond,” he said as he offered his hand.

  “Martine Aubert.”

  “Where are you from?” Bill asked.

  “Lubanda,” Martine answered.

  A less ebullient spirit might have felt rather embarrassed at having to entertain the possibility that Martine was a “native,” but Bill pressed forward obliviously.

  “Well, congratulations on being a citizen of this wonderful country,” he said. “One that will be much more wonderful once Ray is finished with it.” He laughed and slapped me on the back. “Right, Ray?”

  “Right,” I said softly, then watched as Martine’s gaze slid away from me and settled on Fareem. “This is Fareem,” she said to Bill.

  Bill smiled and offered his hand.

  “We’d better finish getting our supplies,” Fareem said to Martine after shaking Bill’s hand with a clear sense of keeping his distance.

  “Well, I hope you’ll join Ray and me for a beer afterwards,” Bill said expansively. He slapped the side of the cooler. “Fresh in from the States.” He indicated a group of wooden benches that rested a few yards from where we stood. “We’ll be waiting right over there.”

  Martine and Fareem smiled politely, then moved away, leaving Bill and me at the edge of the market.

  “Good-looking woman,” Bill said as he watched her. “What’s the story with the local?”

  “Didn’t you hear what she said? They’re both… locals.”

  “I mean the black guy,” Bill said. “Does he live on her farm?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hmm,” Bill mused with something of a verbal leer in his tone.

  We walked a few paces, then stopped in a patch of shade, and in that stillness I became aware that Bill was watching Martine closely.

  “Just how far do you think that woman has gone bush?” he asked with what was now an openly salacious grin.

  “Martine hasn’t ‘gone bush,’” I told him. “She was born bush. That’s what she meant when she told you she was Lubandan.”

  “Yeah, well, she’s living a fantasy if she believes that,” Bill said. His gaze drifted over to me. “Lubanda is a snake that knows its eggs, Ray.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that some people in Rupala already have their eyes on her.”

  “What people?”

  “The people in the Agricultural Ministry,” Bill answered. “They think she may prove to be an obstacle to the ministry’s plans for the region, which is to grow cash crops.”

  “Why would Martine pose a threat to that?”

  Bill smiled. “With your help, maybe she won’t.”

  I didn’t smile back. “I don’t want anything to do with politics.”

  Bill’s smile vanished, and he became dead serious. “Everything is political, Ray. Lubanda hasn’t stabilized yet. In the north, that warlord asshole Mafumi is stirring up some serious trouble.” He abruptly returned his attention to Martine. “But I’m sure she’ll do the right thing.” His attention remained on her for a moment before it returned to me. “Now let’s go have that beer,” he said. He draped his arm over my shoulder and guided me over to the bench that sat a few feet from my quarters. “So,” he said. “Tell me what’s on your mind, project-wise.”

  “I’ve been thinking of a well.” I said. “Only one to begin with, then maybe others.”

  “Great,” Bill said. “Let’s hear it.”

  I reviewed the research I’d done, tracing nomadic routes, going over with him the calculations necessary to determine the likelihood of finding water at various depths, along with the always-considerable risk of finding none at all.

  Bill paid great attention to all this, then said, “Okay, so, where do you plan to dig?”

  I rose, walked into my house, and returned with a map of Lubanda. “Here,” I said, and pointed to the x.

  Bill nodded. “Good enough,” he said. “Write up your project pro­posal and I’ll review it, and if it’s approved, I’ll get you whatever you need.”

  We talked on for a few minutes, and after a time Martine and Fareem strolled over to where we sat.

  “Ray’s going to dig a well,” Bill said ebulliently. He pointed to the mark I’d made on the map. “There.” He smiled at Martine. “What do you think?”

  Martine sat down beside me and for the first time, as our bodies touched, I felt a steady charge in her nearness. She was not classically beautiful, but something furiously sensual came from her, so that a hint of breast beneath her shirt was far more tantalizing to me than anything a Playboy could provide. Her voice, with its musical Lubandan rhythms, added to the mix, of course. And then there were those emerald eyes, soft yet resolute, with something in them that had been tested by heat and dust and long, hard labor. There is nothing more unfathomable than the sort of desire that has the seed of later love inside it. In the end, it has little to do with the flesh and so much to do with the heart and the mind. On a New York street I might not have noticed Martine because she would have been dressed like a million others, spoken like a million others, been framed by the city’s immensity and lost in its faceless crowds. But here in Lubanda, sitting close beside me, she seemed quite suddenly to shimmer with a rough beauty no powder could smooth nor any rouge provide a false bloom of youth. I thought of the women who’d followed the westward trek of my own now distant country, who’d lived in sod houses and weathered the innumerable hards
hips of a land in which they could ultimately depend upon nothing but themselves. Martine had the sense of those older struggles about her, the dust of ages past still clinging to her hair. There was nothing cracked about her, nothing fragile. She was like a vessel whose every particle had been strengthened by a flame.

  “Hmm,” she said as she stared at the map, the place my well was to be located.

  Bill’s gaze remained fixed on Martine. “Good idea, don’t you think?” he asked somewhat tentatively, as if he was already probing for both her strengths and her weaknesses. “To dig a well?”

  When Martine drew her eyes up from the map, the look in them was neither quizzical nor hostile.

  “Have you a pencil?” she asked.

  Bill took one from his shirt pocket and offered it to her.

  She took it, leaned forward, and drew a circle around the x where I’d positioned my proposed well. “The nomads will come to this well,” she said, “and because of the water, they will have bigger herds. But to and from the well, these larger herds will eat more of the grassland, and so the nomads will have to move farther and farther from the well to feed their animals.” She drew a second, wider circle around the x. “The grasses will be eaten clean first here.” She drew a third, still larger circle. “Then here.” Now a much larger circle. “Then here.” She looked at Bill. “All their cows will die within the first circle.” Now she looked at me. “The goats will die within the second circle.” She handed Bill back the pencil, her gaze now fixed on him intently. “When that happens the nomads will have nothing to trade for the grains and materials they need. No meat or milk. Nothing to sustain them… but your water.” She stared at us in that level, no-nonsense way of her. “You are friends of Lubanda, but even so, it is important to know the consequences of what you do,” she added softly.

  Bill looked at her sternly. “We’re trying to do something good for Lubanda,” he said.

  “I am sure you are,” Martine replied. “Honestly. I have no doubt that you are.” She smiled in a way that was not at all superior or even unfriendly. “Did you know that in Nairobi, when the aid workers turn on the air conditioners in their compounds and houses and apartments, the lights dim or go off in the poor parts of the city?”