A Dancer In the Dust

by Thomas H. Cook

  “And your point is what?” Bill asked with an icy smile.

  “That everything is more complicated than you think,” Martine said. “More connected to other things.” She looked at me. “Like your well, Ray.”

  With that she politely said goodbye, turned, and walked away.

  “Does she think I don’t know about these contradictions?” Bill asked when she was out of earshot. “Does she think I don’t know that at conferences on starving children, you’ll find food and wine, all you can fucking eat?” His eyes whipped over to where Martine and Fareem were beginning their homeward journey up Tumasi Road. “It’s easy to make aid workers look like assholes. But, Ray, those people stuffing their faces are getting more done for the world’s poor than Martine Aubert, who is, after all, only taking care of herself.” When he looked at me again, I saw the warning in his eyes. “Be careful, Ray,” he told me, “because she’ll undermine everything you say or do. She’s a primitivist. If it were up to her, Lubanda would stop dead in its tracks.”

  “But do you think she’s right?” I asked Bill. “Technically, you might say. About the well?”

  Bill shrugged. “What I know is that she should keep her mouth shut,” he said quite seriously.

  With that he rose, motioned me forward, and the two of us headed back toward his Land Cruiser, silent all the way.

  Then, once he was behind the wheel, a smile struggled to his lips as he tried to return to his more jovial demeanor. “Just dig your well,” he said, “You’re a good man and you’ve come here to do good. That’s what really matters.”

  A harsh clatter of metal on metal loudly returned me to the present and I was back in New York, facing Herman Dalumi, a man who now seemed uncertain that he’d made the right decision in allowing himself to have anything further to do with me.

  “You look like man in a spell,” he said to me. “A bad magic spell.”

  The elevator door had opened to a bleak landing, a floor covered with a strip of linoleum that seemed never to have known a mop.

  “The dead man’s room is down there,” Dalumi added as we stepped into the foul-smelling corridor.

  I followed him down the hall, though with little expectation that I’d find anything of interest in Seso’s room. Still, it was the way of movie cops and private eyes, a well-known route that generally led from clue to clue until the villain was discovered, and though in real life such an investigation would probably reveal nothing, I calculated that there was little risk in carrying it out.

  We stopped at Seso’s room. Dalumi inserted the key and eased open the door. “You first,” he said as he stepped back and let me go ahead of him, careful to duck under the yellow crime scene tape.

  Imagine a bare room, and then add to it the poorest trappings of necessity. There was a bed with a thin mattress, supported by creaking springs and an iron frame. It was unmade and the blanket, a girlish pink, lay crumpled on the plain wooden floor. There was a chest with two drawers. The mirror was cracked in the lower right corner and again about halfway up, so that the line crossed the forehead of an average-sized man but must have cut ominously across Seso’s throat. There was no closet, only a metal rack like the ones used to transport clothes along the streets of the nearby Garment District and from which hung two plaid shirts, both long-sleeved, and a single pair of badly frayed trousers. A small radiator supplied the room’s only heat, and a dangling bulb its only light. There was no chair, no desk, no adjoining bathroom. A few cans of food rested on the windowsill, but there was no hot plate. A plastic fork, spoon, and knife sprouted from a Styrofoam cup, the room’s sole utensils.

  I walked over to the window and looked out. Below there was a square courtyard littered with whatever had been thrown from the windows that overlooked it.

  “Seso was a quiet man,” I said softly. For a moment, I continued to stare at the brick wall Seso must have faced during the time he’d spent here. Then I turned to Dalumi and suddenly felt the urge to tell some small part of my story.

  “I went to Tumasi to do something good,” I began, “and so I studied the routes the nomads took across that part of Lubanda. They wriggled and curled back on themselves and zigzagged. A journey from one point to another that should have been a mile became two miles, or three, or ten. Because of that, the routes themselves made no sense.”

  Dalumi stared at me silently, his eyes glimmering in the dim light of Seso’s room.

  “I would never have understood these routes if Seso hadn’t told me that the Lutusi wandered in this way in order to familiarize their young with all of their territory, not just to make a beeline to water.”

  “How did this man know any of that?” Dalumi asked. “He said he lived in Rupala.”

  “He knew it because he was a Lutusi,” I said. “A nomad.”

  As I continued, I thought of Seso as he’d been so long ago in Tumasi, shy, rarely speaking to anyone, sitting for long hours simply staring out into the bush, his gaze never so focused as when he caught sight of a line of nomads wandering in from the far reaches of the savanna.

  “The Lutusi send their boys out into the bush, then wander away from them,” I went on. “It’s part of their training. The boys must find the tribe. Seso got lost. He couldn’t find his people. So after a while they looked for him. They found him in the village. He had just wandered in out of the bush. The people in the village knew he was Lutusi and so they knew his people would eventually come back this way. And they were right. The Lutusi came into the village, but they wouldn’t take Seso back.”

  “They are crazy, those nomads,” Dalumi said with the contempt city people generally have for country people, “bumpkin” being a designation that appears in almost every language.

  “It wasn’t because he’d gotten lost that they wouldn’t take him back,” I said. “It was because, while being lost, he had accepted help. A little food and water. He didn’t ask for it, but it was brought to him, and he ate and drank.” I shrugged. “So he ended up with me.”

  I suddenly felt the oddly contradictory elements of Seso’s character come together, the correctness with which he followed my instructions merge with the joylessness with which he followed them, as if his care were itself a diminishment. He’d done his job well, but he’d done nothing beyond his job. He’d never once initiated anything or exhibited any real ambition. Perhaps all he’d ever wanted was to return to the Lutusi.

  “When Seso told me this story, I pointed out the fact that he might have died out there,” I said, “a young boy all alone in the bush. Seso agreed that this was true; he might have died. But he reminded me that he might also have found his people… and himself.”

  After a brief silence, Dalumi said, “You should finish looking now. The woman downstairs, she will not let you stay in this room very long.”

  I set to work immediately, but I found nothing in the drawers of the bureau, nor in the pockets of Seso’s shirts or trousers. I even pulled out each drawer and turned it over, thinking that Seso might have taped some message there.

  But there was nothing.

  “Okay,” I said. “We can go.”

  Dalumi didn’t move. “You said this man never returned to his people.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Maybe this is not true.”

  The look in Dalumi’s eyes was unmistakable. He had a trader’s instinct for the deal.

  “It would cost you a little bit more,” he said.

  “And if it isn’t worth it?” I asked.

  Dalumi smiled. “That’s a chance you take.”

  “How much do you want?” I asked.

  Dalumi hesitated a moment, calculating the value. “I will say fifty dollars.”

  I nodded.

  “I was here when the janitor found the dead one.” He smiled at the opportunity this had presented to him. “Since he was dead, I came to see what he had. Why should I not do this? He was dead, so what did it matter, the things he had. Maybe a watch. Maybe a ring.” He shrugged. “The
police would take everything, or if not the police, the thieves who run this place, so I said to myself, hey, maybe there is something here I can use.” He drew a small photograph from his wallet and handed it to me. “I found this, and now, it is worth fifty dollars.”

  I took the picture from him and looked at it, unsure that it was worth the money I’d agreed to pay, but reluctant not to keep it.

  “Okay,” I said. “The fifty’s yours.”

  10

  “So in the end, Seso went back to his tribe,” Bill said when I showed him the photograph as we sat in a coffee shop the next morning.

  The photograph showed Seso in his midthirties. He was no longer dressed in shirt and trousers. Instead he wore the orange robes of the Lutusi, a staff in one hand, the other holding a little boy of three or four, also clothed in orange robes, and obviously his son. Another man stood beside Seso, dressed in shirt and trousers. He had one hand on Seso’s staff, a sign of the great trust Seso had in him.

  “I know the village where this was taken,” I told Bill. “It’s called Sura. Seso’s best friend lived there. He’s the other man in the picture. He was like Seso, a castout from the Lutusi. I met him several times. His name was Bisara.”

  Bill seemed barely to have heard any of this. His gaze was still fixed on the photograph.

  “I’m surprised that the Lutusi took Seso back,” he said.

  “There was always a way to return,” I told him. “It isn’t easy, a real test of endurance, but it could be done. But once it’s done, you could never depart from any of the Lutusi customs. Not in the slightest. If you did, they would never take you back.”

  “A hard people,” Bill said.

  “Or just a very careful one,” I said. “Wary of outside corruption.”

  Bill handed me back the photograph. “Risk-aversive, you might say.”

  “The question is, why didn’t Seso stay with his people, instead of coming here?” I said as I returned the picture to my jacket pocket.

  We talked on for a time. I told Bill the little I’d learned from Dalumi, my conclusion being that I’d hit a wall quite as windowless as the one Seso had faced outside his room.

  “Only one thing seemed odd,” I said. “Seso told Dalumi about a woman in Tumasi. A white woman. He said he was working for her.”

  Bill’s expression changed abruptly. “Martine?” he asked.

  “Who else could it be?”

  Bill looked genuinely puzzled.

  “When I saw Seso in Rupala, he didn’t mention Martine,” I added. “It was as if he’d erased all that from his mind.”

  Bill shook his head. “It should have stopped with that first letter from Rupala, Ray,” he said gravely.

  In Bill’s troubled features, I saw once again just how much the Tumasi Road Incident had changed both of us, called into question all the things we’d hoped for and trusted. Even so, it was hard for me to calculate just how deep the fissure ran in Bill, how lasting the damage of that human quake, what once sturdy structures it had leveled.

  “That letter should have been enough,” Bill said.

  As I now vividly recalled, the letter had been delivered by a low-ranking military officer who’d given it to Martine with a big sunflower smile. He’d driven all the way from Rupala, and the letter had borne the equally winning sunflower seal of President Dasai’s office. The president had even added a personal note: I hope this finds you well, my child.

  “This came from Rupala,” Martine said when she handed me the letter. “I have been expecting it.”

  I read the letter, and was quite confident that it was only a polite, and not at all unreasonable, request from Rupala.

  “They just want you to consider growing coffee so that Lubanda can have a stronger place in the…”—I glanced down at the letter in order to quote it exactly—“…global market.”

  Fareem suddenly appeared at the door. He looked far more worried than Martine, perhaps, I thought, because he’d already glimpsed the risk she was running by the simple act of being herself. “What do you think, Ray?” he asked with obvious urgency. “How should we answer the letter?”

  “There is no need to answer it,” Martine said before I could respond to Fareem’s question. She drew the letter from my fingers. “The big men in Rupala do not care about my little farm. They are listening to the foreigners who want Lubanda to become part of the ‘global market.’” A curious sadness fell over her. “And if we do not or cannot become what they want us to become, they will make us feel ashamed of what we are.”

  With that, she folded the letter, dropped it into her basket, put the basket on her head, and stepped out of the room, leaving Fareem behind.

  “She is thinking of Nadumu,” he said. “A young man she…” He stopped and shook his head. “It is not for me to say about this.” He shrugged. “Anyway, Martine thinks something bad is coming and that this letter is only the beginning of it.”

  “But it’s just a government request,” I assured him.

  Fareem was anything but convinced of this.

  “It’s Martine’s farm, Fareem,” I repeated by way of calming what seemed to me his unjustified dread. “In the end, she doesn’t have to grow coffee if she doesn’t want to.”

  He shrugged, still unconvinced. “I must go to her now,” he said.

  He walked out into the market, and after a time I rose, stepped over to the door, and looked out to where I could see them moving through the stalls, buying and bartering in the way they always had.

  A few minutes earlier, I’d sent Seso out for a few supplies, and just as I was about to return to my work, I saw him come up to Martine and Fareem and the three of them become a small, compact group within the general ebb and flow of the market.

  It was a vision of them together in that market, together in the peace that had reigned in Lubanda at that time, which now, so many years later, struck me as quite poignant, a connection soon to be severed, a world soon to be consumed.

  “What Martine did wasn’t for herself alone,” I said to Bill. “She wasn’t just living for herself the way you said she was that day in the village.”

  “I know,” Bill said softly. “Otherwise she wouldn’t have done what she did. But unfortunately, that’s not how she was painted.” He shrugged. “White devils all look alike.”

  I released a breath made weary by old memories. “You know, Bill, in one way or another, we were both as naïve as Mr. Quayle in Bleak House,” I said. “Convinced that Africa could be saved by teaching the natives to build pianoforte legs.”

  To my surprise, Bill offered no resistance, or even a counterargument, to this dark assessment. Instead, he took a sip from his coffee and looked out at the street, briefly but with great concentration, as if he were in the midst of a grave reevaluation. “Coffee,” he said. “Why couldn’t she just have grown coffee?”

  The answer to that question was simple, and so I stated it.

  “She didn’t grow coffee because the nomads didn’t drink it,” I said. “They never took any stimulants, remember? You’d never have caught them chewing khat like Mafumi’s thugs. Martine wouldn’t have grown coffee any more than she would have grown opium. And even if she had, she couldn’t have used it to trade with the Lutusi.”

  “The problem is that a society can’t move forward on any kind of purely local exchange,” Bill said in his most authoritative, think-tank voice.

  “The trouble is that we always define ‘forward’ as moving in our direction,” I said bleakly. “But not everyone can, and not everyone should.”

  Bill nodded. “Perhaps so,” he admitted.

  I shrugged. “Anyway, Martine had already set her course,” I added, then told him about the first time the risk of defying the “big men” in Rupala became clear.

  I could no longer remember why I’d come to her farm that afternoon, though it was probably because the feeling I had for her, a strange mixture of admiration and desire, had been steadily growing during my time in Lubanda. The reas
on for this attraction was the same as it had been at the beginning, when I’d first begun to visit her—the hard life she’d lived, the stronger elements of her character that I’d only recently grasped, the fact that she seemed satisfied by her meager lot and didn’t in the least expect ever to have more than her hardscrabble farm. From time to time, she would pick up a little package from what amounted to the post office, always a book she’d bought with whatever tiny amount of discretionary income her farm provided. But other than these occasional packages, she received nothing from outside Lubanda, nor appeared in the slightest degree drawn toward any aspect of that outer world’s allure.

  Even so, it would be many years before I understood the strange power in those, like Martine, whose hopes are modest, whose struggle is to retain what they have and what they are rather than acquire what they do not have or become what they are not. It wouldn’t be to mankind’s advantage if all people were this way, of course, but it is distinctly to its advantage that some are. The tragedy for Martine was that this little nugget of understanding came to me too late, and was, in fact, a jewel purchased with her blood.

  In any event, on that particular day, I wasn’t Martine’s only visitor. It was only a few minutes after I arrived that he showed up, the minister of President Dasai’s newly formed Agricultural Commission. He came in a flashy new Land Cruiser, but was dressed in the humbler attire of a yellow dashiki somewhat similar to the president’s.

  “Ah, you must be Miss Martine Aubert,” he said cheerfully as he came toward Martine, Fareem, and me where we sat beneath the scrawny little tree that gave the only shade to the front yard.

  Martine glanced first at Fareem, then at me, and in that look I saw the first glimmer of real fear, her dread that a dark tide was approaching slowly but inexorably, and that at some point she would either have to resist it or get out of its way.

  We all rose as he approached, a gesture of respect toward a man who did not seem in the least threatening.